Reuters U.K. reported on 27 December 2018 that American payment services firm Visa recently purchased Earthport, a financial services company based in the U.K. and partnered with Ripple Labs, the company behind the major cryptocurrency Ripple (XRP).
According to Reuters, the purchase will be made with the price of either £198 million (approx. $251 million), or 30 pence ($0.38) per each Earthport share. It would be considered overpay if Visa purchases the firm with the price of 30 pence per share, since it is 4 times higher than their stocks’ closing price on Monday, which was 7.45 pence.
Earthport is a financial services firm based in London specialized in cross-border payment services for banks and financial establishments. The company also partnered with tech firm Ripple Labs to improve the firm’s international transfer services by integrating Ripple’s blockchain technology onto its platform.
The company reportedly utilises a single API (Application Program Interface) to make international payments. In 2016, the company became more well known after they launched the first DLH (Distributed Ledger Hub) in the world which allowed the company to provide varying payment methods its clients around the globe via the single API. This also includes access to the Ripple ecosystem.
Unfortunately, according to the London Stock Exchange’s secondary market, Earthport’s shares dropped by a huge 28% this year as losses and expenses increase. The slump in share value caused the company to consider making fundamental changes to its operation strategies.
Visa face issues back in June when there were frequent disruptions in their card payments across the U.S. and Europe. The Payment Systems Regulator implied that the problem only occurs when Visa card payments are made. While promising to fix the issue as soon as possible, Visa is not letting this issue stop them from proceeding with their plans. In October, it was reported that the company is preparing to launch its blockchain-based digital identity system called ‘Visa B2B Connect’ in the first quarter of 2019. The cross-border payment system transforms important banking details such as account numbers into tokens and assigns them respective cryptographic identifiers which will be utilised during transactions on the platform.
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