Ripple, the company behind the XRP token, on Thursday said it plans to help launch PayID after joining a consortium of over 40 global companies and nonprofits.
The San Francisco-headquartered firm is now part of the Open Payments Coalition that will debut PayID which will enable people around the world to easily pay a person or business entity. PayID will combine Ripple’s innovative solutions and the power of the efforts by the Open Payments Coalition to shake up the global payments system.
Transforming Global Payments With PayID
The newly formed coalition which includes industry leaders like GoPay, Blockchain.com, Brave, Ripple, Mercy Corps, BitPay, and others, have linked up to create PayID, a free and open standard that will make sending and receiving money across the globe easier than it is right now.
PayID will be a single global payment network that will allow anyone across any network or using any kind of currency (fiat or crypto) to easily send both small and large payments. In other words, “Payments will no longer run over fragmented networks using proprietary standards to complicated account numbers; but rather, they will use a united network in which all payment companies participate—one built for today’s consumers and businesses,” a blog post on June 18 stated.
The new universal payment identifier system is specifically designed to boost natural growth by eliminating the possibility of a single firm setting the terms for joining. As the blog post insists, PayID will be consumer-oriented in that it eliminates complex account numbers and instead allows customers to use simple names that can be easily remembered and typed.
Creating A Solution That Makes Sending Payments As Easy As Sending Emails, Texts
The core benefit proposition of PayID is to make sending money to family or friends as seamless as sending an email or a text message. This aligns perfectly with Ripple’s vision of creating a payments infrastructure that allows everyone to transfer value as easily as they transfer information today –an idea that Ripple refers to as the Internet of Value (IoV).
Ripple’s global payment network system that is now leveraged by over 300 customers, RippleNet, is integrating with PayID to simplify cross-border payments.
That being said, Ripple concludes:
“By enabling a world where money moves as easily as information, PayID drives digital payments forward, simplifying global payments for all and brings the world one step closer to realizing the IoV. Ripple is proud to be among this coalition of industry leaders helping to establish this much-needed open standard for interoperability so that IoV can become a reality.”
PayID; A Hedge Against Libra?
In theory, PayID appears like a very simple service for clients and businesses around the world to use. SVP of Ripple’s Xpring, Ethan Beard told Fortune that PayID has a design that resembles the Internet’s domain name system.
But, the fact that it can work across other platforms will likely make it hard for payment providers like Square and Venmo to adopt it. However, Beard is of the opinion that such companies will end up embracing it as a hedge against closed protocols like Facebook’s Libra or Alipay:
“Facebook and [Chinese payment giant] AliPay want to create closed, proprietary networks. Even someone as big as PayPal should be wary.”
