Ripple is deepening its presence in the Middle East through a new partnership with Bahrain Fintech Bay (BFB), the kingdom’s leading fintech incubator and blockchain ecosystem builder.
The collaboration, announced on Oct. 9, strengthens Ripple’s foothold in a region rapidly becoming a testing ground for digital asset infrastructure.
Indeed, Bahrain has long positioned itself as a fintech gateway to the Gulf. In 2019, the country’s central bank was one of the first in the world to issue comprehensive crypto-asset regulations, attracting early pilots from firms like Binance.
By joining forces with BFB, Ripple gains access to an innovation hub that connects government regulators, banks, and fintechs experimenting with cross-border remittance technologies.
This gives it a strategic foothold in the Middle East market, where digital payments rapidly expand but remain constrained by compliance costs, exchange-rate risks, and patchy interoperability between national regimes.
Meanwhile, the Bahrain partnership complements Ripple’s earlier regulatory victory in Dubai, where it obtained a payments license from the Dubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA) in March.
These jurisdictions anchor a two-hub strategy to connect the Gulf’s most significant financial centers under a shared digital-asset framework in the Middle East.
How does this benefit Ripple’s XRP and RLUSD?
According to World Bank data, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region collectively handled over $58 billion in remittance flows last year.
These massive multi-currency flows present a significant opportunity that Ripple’s technology was built to solve.
Through its XRP-based settlement network, Ripple enables institutions to move value instantly without maintaining costly pre-funded accounts. This results in cheaper and faster cross-border transfers in corridors that traditionally take days to settle.
If the Brad Garlinghouse-led firm captures just 2% of the region’s $58 billion remittance market, this would translate into more than $1 billion in annual on-chain transactions, potentially driving liquidity demand for XRP.
However, the opportunity in the region is matched by an attendant complexity. Despite Bahrain’s openness, most MENA jurisdictions still impose stringent controls on cross-border money transfers.
The divergent anti-money laundering and know-your-customers frameworks create overlapping requirements that can delay settlements and increase operational costs, especially for smaller providers.
Ripple’s approach of embedding auditable, real-time transaction data directly on-chain offers regulators a unified view of money movement, potentially streamlining oversight while preserving transparency. If implemented widely, this structure could reconcile the region’s fragmented compliance systems with the global reach of digital finance.
Push for remittances
The move toward digitized remittances has also introduced heightened cybersecurity and fraud risks. Phishing scams, identity theft, and data breaches have tested consumer trust in mobile and online transfers.
Ripple’s institutional-grade custody framework, layered with advanced encryption and blockchain immutability, could provide the assurance regional banks need to expand digital-asset services without compromising security.
Exchange-rate volatility adds another layer of uncertainty. Currency fluctuations routinely erode the real value of remittances, reducing the amount that families ultimately receive. Ripple USD (RLUSD), a US dollar–backed stablecoin now valued at approximately $790 million in market capitalization, provides a stabilizing mechanism for regional transactions.
By pairing RLUSD with XRP as a bridge asset, institutions can execute near-instant conversions between local currencies and dollar settlements, shielding users from currency swings and improving predictability for both senders and receivers.
Meanwhile, competition across the remittance industry remains fierce. Established players like Western Union and MoneyGram face mounting pressure from digital-first challengers such as Wise and Remitly, which have reset consumer expectations around fees and speed.
Ripple’s advantage lies not in retail front-ends but in building the institutional infrastructure that underpins them. By equipping banks and licensed fintechs with the same efficiency as consumer-facing platforms, within a compliant framework, Ripple’s network could transform XRP-driven settlements into a standard component of regional financial infrastructure, rather than a speculative experiment.
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