Ripple expands partnership with Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

• Ripple has joined Mojaloop as a board member and will continue to expand the partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
• Other board members of the Mojaloop Foundation include Google, ModusBox, Omidyar Network, Coil, PhonePe and The Rockefeller Foundation.

The Mojaloop Foundation announced yesterday that India’s leading digital payment platform PhonePe and Ripple have joined as sponsor members, the highest level of the organization. With this, Ripple continues to expand its partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and is now on the board of the Mojaloop Foundation along with that foundation, Google, ModusBox, Omidyar Network, Coil and The Rockefeller Foundation.

In the role as sponsor member, Ripple will help provide “the strategic vision, corporate governance and technical guidance to ensure the long-term health and growth of the Mojaloop open source software and development community,” the press release said. The Mojaloop Foundation is dedicated to promoting financial inclusion by enabling organizations to create interoperable payment systems that enable digital financial services for all.

There are 1.7 billion people without bank accounts worldwide, particularly in regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and East and Southeast Asia. It is precisely these people that the Mojaloop Foundation wants to help by making digital financial services available to all. To this end, the foundation is developing an open source software platform.

This will improve the interoperability of payment systems and make it easier and more affordable to send and receive money, especially in emerging markets. Since its establishment in 2017, Ripple has been involved in the foundation, providing technical advice and support. In a blog post on joining the board of the Mojaloop Foundation, Ripple now explained:

Today, Ripple is joining the Mojaloop Foundation as a Sponsor member. We are proud to continue our partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and to collaborate with fellow Mojaloop Sponsor members including Coil Technologies and Google in working towards a more inclusive future where everyone, everywhere can access digital financial services needed to connect to the global economy. […]

We look forward to participating in the foundation’s efforts to engage and involve local developers and entrepreneurs—and to collaborate with central banks, financial institutions and non-governmental organizations (NGOs)—in harnessing the power of the Mojaloop platform to improve payment ecosystems.

As the Mojaloop Foundation’s official press release states, Ripple’s Corporate Social Impact Program, Ripple for Good, will help mission-oriented organizations “dramatically increase the number of people who participate fully and equally in the global financial system”. Ken Weber, Ripple’s Head of Social Impact, will serve on the board of the Mojaloop Foundation. Weber commented on the common goals of the Mojaloop Foundation and Ripple as follows:

Creating economic fairness and opportunity for the unbanked and vulnerable populations is Ripple’s highest social impact priority—a natural extension of Ripple’s core business, which is making cross-border payments faster, cheaper and more reliable and accessible for hundreds of millions of consumers and businesses globally.

As CNF reported, Coil, the start-up funded by Ripple, had already joined the Mojaloop Foundation in May this year. Coil is developing an ecosystem in which XRP is used for web monetization and is being funded by Ripple with a grant of 1 billion XRP, approximately $260 million.