Ripple's Partners, Past and Present: What Happened to MoneyGram and Western Union?

Corporate partnership lists age badly. A bank can test a product, announce a pilot, move to production, change technology three years later and still appear forever on a crypto infographic labelled “Ripple partner”. In payments, that is particularly misleading because *partner* can mean customer, investor, joint venture, liquidity provider, pilot participant, steering-group member or technology integrator.

For XRP readers, one more distinction is essential. Ripple can sell software or payment services without XRP being used in the transaction. Historical RippleNet products such as xCurrent were not the same thing as xRapid, the product that used XRP as a bridge asset and was later folded into On-Demand Liquidity (ODL). Product branding has changed again since then. A relationship with Ripple therefore does not automatically mean demand for XRP.

A practical status guide to major names

American Express and Santander

In November 2017 Ripple and American Express announced a commercial cross-border payments service for American Express FX International Payments customers sending qualifying U.S.-dollar payments to Santander UK. The announcement described RippleNet connectivity. It did not say XRP was the settlement asset.

Santander separately launched One Pay FX in 2018 using Ripple's xCurrent technology. That was a meaningful production use case for Ripple software, but xCurrent was not an XRP bridge-liquidity product. Those announcements are historically important. They are not evidence, by themselves, that American Express or Santander uses XRP in 2026.

PNC

Ripple announced in 2018 that PNC Bank's Treasury Management unit had joined RippleNet and would enable commercial clients to receive cross-border payments. Contemporary reporting identified xCurrent as the technology. The careful description today is “historical RippleNet/xCurrent relationship”. Public evidence of current XRP usage should not be assumed.

Standard Chartered

Ripple announced Standard Chartered among banks using Ripple-powered services in 2017 and included the bank in earlier network announcements. Again, the documented relationship concerned Ripple's enterprise payment technology. There is no basis for converting that old announcement into a claim that Standard Chartered currently settles with XRP.

SBI: a relationship that clearly persisted

SBI is different because the relationship did not end with a single old press release. Ripple and SBI Holdings created SBI Ripple Asia in 2016. Ripple still maintains a current page for the joint venture, and in June 2026 Ripple and SBI Group announced the launch of Ripple USD (RLUSD) in Japan. SBI Remit has also been documented using Ripple infrastructure; a 2021 ODL launch for Japan explicitly described XRP use in the Japan-Philippines corridor.

Even here, precision matters. SBI Ripple Asia's current information says the joint venture itself does not handle XRP. Different SBI group entities and payment corridors can have different roles.

Tranglo: a current, clearly documented payments relationship

Ripple acquired a 40% stake in Malaysian cross-border payments company Tranglo in 2021, with the stated aim of expanding ODL. Ripple's current customer case study says Tranglo uses Ripple Payments to process instant cross-border payments. This is a much stronger basis for calling Tranglo a current Ripple payments partner than relying on a five- or ten-year-old announcement.

MoneyGram: the most important case study

MoneyGram was not just a logo on a slide. In June 2019 Ripple entered a commercial agreement with MoneyGram and made an equity investment. MoneyGram's own SEC filings later described its use of Ripple's ODL platform and XRP for foreign-exchange settlement for MoneyGram's own account.

The economics are important. MoneyGram also disclosed that Ripple paid it “market development fees” based on the volume of foreign-exchange trades made using ODL. That does not mean the transactions were fake. It means adoption was financially incentivised, which matters when assessing how commercially self-sustaining the model was at the time.

The relationship collided with regulatory risk after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sued Ripple in December 2020. MoneyGram's 2020 annual report says it stopped transacting under the commercial agreement in early December 2020 amid uncertainty and exchange restrictions affecting XRP. On 7 March 2021, the parties terminated the agreement. Ripple publicly described the decision as mutual.

It is therefore too simple to say MoneyGram “proved XRP failed”. The arrangement demonstrated that XRP could be used in production for liquidity, but it was also subsidised and vulnerable to regulatory uncertainty. When that uncertainty became commercially uncomfortable, MoneyGram stepped away.

Western Union: not the same story

Western Union is often placed beside MoneyGram, but the history is different. In 2018 CEO Hikmet Ersek confirmed that Western Union was testing Ripple technology, and reporting at the time said the tests included xRapid/XRP. Later that year Ersek said the trial had not produced cost savings compared with Western Union's existing system and that the tested Ripple approach was, at that stage, still too expensive.

That is not evidence of a long-running XRP production partnership that was later “cancelled”. It was closer to a technology evaluation that did not clear the company's economic hurdle at the time.

There is an important lesson here. Western Union already had a huge global network, treasury relationships, compliance systems and negotiated foreign-exchange arrangements. A startup can look dramatically cheaper when compared with a hypothetical correspondent-bank route. Replacing an incumbent that has already amortised much of its infrastructure is a different calculation.

What about Bank of America?

Bank of America is perhaps the clearest example of why XRP Online should resist partnership folklore. Ripple representatives and industry reporting have historically linked Bank of America with Ripple advisory or steering-group activity and a pilot. However, the public evidence does not justify confidently stating that Bank of America is currently a production XRP customer in 2026. Unless the bank or Ripple publishes current, specific product evidence, “historical relationship/pilot reported” is the more defensible wording.

Why partnership status is hard to track

Banks do not issue a press release every time a vendor contract changes. Products get renamed. Integrations can remain active while marketing relationships fade. A financial institution may use Ripple messaging while sourcing liquidity conventionally. Another may use digital assets in selected corridors but not elsewhere.

That means a serious partnership database should track at least four fields: announcement date, product, XRP involvement and latest independently verifiable status. “Partner: yes/no” throws away too much information.

Related reading: Why faster settlement does not guarantee adoption; What can be verified about confidential agreements.

XRP for Newbies

Ripple is a company that sells payment and digital-asset infrastructure. XRP is a separate digital asset. Some Ripple customers have used products that did not require XRP; other arrangements, such as MoneyGram's former ODL use and certain SBI corridors, explicitly involved XRP. A company being called a “Ripple partner” does not tell you which product it used or whether it still uses it today.

The Bottom Line

Ripple has worked with serious financial institutions, and some deployments progressed beyond pilots. But the evidence is uneven and changes over time. MoneyGram was a genuine ODL/XRP production relationship that ended amid regulatory uncertainty. Western Union was primarily a test that did not show enough economic benefit at the time. SBI and Tranglo provide stronger evidence of continuing relationships. The responsible way to discuss the rest is company by company, product by product and date by date — not by recycling an old logo wall as proof of current XRP adoption.