- Conversation at Swell event in Singapore occurred between Holmes and CEO of Ripple
- Holmes also focused on other areas while at Swell, such as the wider remittance industry plus his own firm’s goals
- “What I love about ODL is that we’re completely at the forefront of this technology”, he said
The leader of worldwide online money transfer service MoneyGram has made a series of interesting remarks on the state of the market during a conference in Singapore.
Alex Holmes, who is both chairman and CEO of the firm, was speaking at the Swell conference hosted by Ripple – and he covered a wide range of topics during the interview.
His firm is in a partnership with Ripple, which is a blockchain-powered payments platform.
Ripple provides payment settling services to MoneyGram, and the deal is scheduled to last at least two years.
During a conversation with the CEO of Ripple, Brad Garlinghouse, Holmes emphasised the benefits of ODL, which is a Ripple service designed to enable better cross border payments.
“What I love about ODL is that we’re completely at the forefront of this technology”, remarked Holmes.
“We’re able to settle billions of dollars in seconds. The magic really comes from pairing MoneyGram transactions with Ripple’s ODL.”
He also confirmed that the company was looking to make large moves into the cloud, while also pairing this up with blockchain innovation.
“We’re migrating our legacy systems to the cloud and looking at how we can use blockchain distributed ledger technology to improve our core systems”, he explained.
Broader strategic goals for MoneyGram were also discussed during the session.
In an interesting move, it was revealed by Holmes at the event that a tenth of the firm’s ODL transactions were now flowing from the US to Mexico and vice versa.
He also offered some opinions on the global remittances industry more generally – making a call for “solutions” to problems like disjointed institutions.
“The fundamental challenge of moving money around the world is that there isn’t a lot of coordination between financial institutions and there should be more solutions to connect all of these pieces”, he said.
This is definitely an interesting series of remarks from MoneyGram’s CEO Alex Holmes.
To some extent, Holmes might possibly have felt a little on the defensive: in a recent earnings report, for example, it was revealed that the firm is still not profitable and is making net losses into the millions.
However, this interview with Ripple’s CEO shows that Holmes definitely does have his eyes on the future.
By ranging confidently over topics as diverse as ODL to innovation, he is clearly seeking to reassure both investors and customers that MoneyGram is a firm that is on the rise and will continue to be so for a long time to come.
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