Ripple has signed a deal with a Malaysian money transfer company and Bangladesh’s largest provider of mobile financial services to enable a remittance corridor between the two countries.
Malaysia’s Mobile Money and Bangladesh’s bKash will use Ripple’s global payments network, RippleNet, for wallet-to-wallet transactions, according to an announcement made Tuesday.
“This partnership will … further contribute to our economy by promoting the flow of foreign remittances through legal channels,” said Kamal Quadir, CEO of bKash.
Under the jurisdiction of the Central Bank of Bangladesh, the Mutual Trust Bank (MTB) will act as the domestic banking partner for processing transfers.
While MobileMoney makes up a small fraction of mobile payments in Malaysia, bKash has a user base of more than 45 million. The company currently captures a large portion of the country’s remittance flows, the third largest in South Asia.
“Last year, remittances in Bangladesh hit an all-time high of $ 18.2 billion, with the majority of those remittances coming from Malaysia, Middle Eastern countries and the US,” said Syed Mahbubur Rahman, CEO of Mutual Bank.
The partners don’t seem to be put off by Ripple’s legal troubles in the US. The company is being sued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for alleging that it violated federal securities laws by selling the XRP cryptocurrency to retail customers.