oracletimes.com
Just ahead of the New Year’s Eve, Visa is making import financial moves, and they involve one of Ripple’s partners.
Earthport Plc is a Ripple partner and payment network for cross-border transactions.
The latest reports coming from Reuters U.K. are revealing that Visa Inc, the American payment services giant is buying the network.
Earthport’s shares dropped by 28% this year
Earthport was built back in 1997, and it’s based in London. The financial services company provides cross-border services to banks and financial institutions.
Earthport teamed up with Ripple a while ago with the primary aim of integrating the Ripple protocol into the company’s payment network in order to enhance international transactions.
According to Cointelegraph, Reuters reports that the acquisition was made f0r the impressive price tag of $251 million/ 30 pence per each Earthport share.
Earthport’s shares are listed on the London Stock Exchange’s secondary market, and they have gone down by more than 28% this year following losses and expenses.
This is the main reasons that triggered the need to change the company’s strategy, according to reports.
Earthport launched an API
Back in 2016, Earthport launched an API that was created to connect banks to Ripple’s distributed ledger protocol when they are operating international financial transactions, as reported by Finextra via Cointelegraph.
This development aimed at eliminating various stringent limitations including budget, technology and compliance-related issues.
Visa has been preparing Visa B2B Connect
Visa has been working for a while at its blockchain-based digital identity system called Visa B2B Connect for cross-border payments. It’s set to launch on Q1 2019.
This system will work by tokenizing sensitive banking data and account numbers so that they have a unique cryptographic identifier which will be used during transactions.
This came after during the summer Visa said that their card payments have been experiencing disruptions across the US and Europe if you recall.
The problem was isolated to Visa card payments. The financial giant didn’t reveal the cause back then, and they just posted on Twitter that the issue is under investigation and it will get fixed ASAP.