Ripple Labs today announced that it has appointed Dilip Rao as Managing Director of its new Ripple Labs Asia Pacific subsidiary. The office was established in response to growing demand for Ripple’s real-time settlement protocol in the region, and to more directly connect interested Ripple Labs partners in the United States and Europe with Asian Pacific markets.
With Ripple, banks in the Asia-Pacific region will look to reduce their liquidity and compliance costs with straight-through processing, access to retail FX rates, and end-to-end transaction traceability to power instant cross-border remittance, corporate payment, and institutional payment services.
According to McKinsey, in 2013, cross-border payments in Asia Pacific totaled $200 billion, and accounted for nearly half of all payment revenues in the region. Also according to McKinsey, Intra-Asia trade flows totaled almost $3 trillion in 2012, and are expected to surpass intra-Europe trade flows to become the largest in the world by 2016.
Ripple protocol benefits
The first office for Ripple Labs Asia Pacific is based in Sydney, Australia, and is actively recruiting integration engineers, architects and other key hires. Ripple Lab Asia Pacific demonstrates the company’s commitment to the emerging and dynamic market, and its regional mandate will include Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China and other countries in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
“We are excited to formally unveil a presence in Asia Pacific — an area that has been aggressively pursuing faster payment technologies for both domestic and cross-border payments,” said Ripple Labs CEO and co-founder Chris Larsen. “Dilip is a natural fit to lead this office because of his years of experience in the space and his deep, engaged network in the region.”
Dilip Rao leads business development and operations for Ripple Labs Asia Pacific. In this role he engages with leading banks, regulators and central banks in support of Ripple’s adoption.
He has more than 25 years of experience in senior management with technology multinationals in technical, sales and marketing roles in Asia. He has consulted to major banks and corporates in Australia on innovation and was the founder of Australia’s first person-to-person payments startup.
Rao holds degrees in Physics and Electrical Engineering and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, India.
“I am thrilled to bring Ripple Labs to Sydney, where we can more effectively serve eager markets in India, Singapore, the Middle East and across APAC,” said Rao. “Banks and enterprises can leverage Ripple to more efficiently service the exploding trade and remittance flows in this region.”
Ripple Labs is the global leader in distributed financial technology and standards. The team supports the adoption of Ripple, a settlement protocol that enables the world’s disparate financial networks to securely transfer funds in any currency in real time. Banks, money transmitters and clearing houses can use Ripple as an alternative to correspondent banking to facilitate straight through processing with no reserve funding required. Earthport, the largest open network for global bank payments, and three banks in the United States and Germany recently announced Ripple integrations.
Ripple was created to enable the world to move value as easily as information moves today, giving rise to an Internet of Value (IoV) akin to today’s Internet of Knowledge. For more information about Ripple Labs, click here. For more information about Ripple, click here.
To view Ripples Executive Summary for Financial Institutions, click here (PDF).