Ripple Partners Xago And Mercury Selected For South Africa’s IFWG Sandbox

Mercury FX stands as one of Ripple’s long-time partners, and a prolific user of the On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) payment solution based on XRP. Mercury, alongside another Ripple partner, Xago Technologies, has been accepted within the South African Intergovernmental Fintech Working Group (IFWG)’s regulatory sandbox. The announcement was made today, and Ripple highlighted that 50 companies had applied to be part of the nation’s first regulatory sandbox.

A Proving Ground For Innovation

The sandbox itself is designed in order to allow various market innovators the chance to test out various new services and products within an environment pushing the boundaries of the ongoing regulations within the country. Of course, the relevant regulator is responsible for overseeing the entire event, as well.

The IFWG leads this initiative, with the Financial Sector Conduct Authority, the Financial Intelligence Center, the National Credit Regulator, the National Treasury, the South African Revenue Service, and the South African Reserve Bank all participating within it

Mercury is known for both its Ripple partnership and its partnership with VALR, a cryptocurrency exchange. The company was selected as one of the six final applicants to be accepted. The entire goal for IFWG through this sandbox is to promote innovation within South Africa’s financial markets, particularly its fintech space. According to Ripple, the region makes it faster to move money by air than it actually is to send it through a foreign wire.

Ripple Planning To Push Into South Africa

With this in mind, Mercury FX is planning to significantly shorten this time window for money transfers, reducing it to a matter of a few minutes thanks to the ODL service and XRP tokens.

Ripple gave a public statement, showing why it chose Mercury FX to begin with. Ripple highlighted Mercury’s belief in blockchain-based money transfers thanks to this announcement of the IFWG. Further goals from Mercury are to significantly cut down on the cost and time needed to send money in and out of the country through the use of RippleNet and ODL.

Ripple Committed To Global Efforts For Better FinTech

Ripple gave the mandatory expression of being honored for being part of this transformation process within South Africa’s international payments and remittances process, doing so through innovative partners like Mercury. Ripple re-affirmed its commitment to support similar efforts across the globe, promising to work closely with regulators in order to ensure the success of it.

Time will tell how successful this business will be. Africa is still severely underdeveloped when compared to other countries in the world, and there’s plentiful potential for these innovations to completely take the place of other legacy financial systems.