Ripple, the leading provider of enterprise blockchain solutions for global payments, today announced the appointment of Brooks Entwistle as Managing Director of Southeast Asia to lead and scale the company’s operations in its fastest growing region.
Ripple also highlighted continued momentum in Southeast Asia with existing customers Siam Commercial Bank and iRemit, and announced Singapore-based remittance company BKK Forex joining Ripple’s global financial network RippleNet to process SME and remittance payments from Singapore to Thailand.
Finance and tech veteran joins Ripple to capitalize on the region’s fintech boom
Based out of Ripple’s Southeast Asia headquarters in Singapore, Brooks Entwistle brings three decades of senior management experience in both the financial services and technology industries, with the mission to drive digital asset and blockchain adoption in the region. His appointment comes at a time when the company is deepening and expanding its presence across this dynamic region for RippleNet, which includes 14 countries.
Brooks was most recently the Chief Business Officer (International) at Uber, where he led its regional growth strategy, launching Uber in new markets and navigating through regulatory challenges across Asia Pacific. Prior to joining Uber, he spent over two decades at Goldman Sachs, and was partner and chairman of the bank’s Southeast Asia business.
Asheesh Birla, General Manager of RippleNet at Ripple said: “Southeast Asia’s payments ecosystem is extremely dynamic with fairly complex, country-specific schemes which require a lot of in-depth knowledge. The adoption of RippleNet among the region’s many fintechs, payments service providers and SMEs makes Southeast Asia our biggest market for both customer demand and transaction growth. We’re excited to welcome Brooks to lead the charge as Ripple doubles down on efforts to further our phenomenal growth in the region.”
Brooks Entwistle, Managing Director of Southeast Asia at Ripple said: “I’m thrilled to join Ripple to scale the company’s footprint in this pivotal region. Having helped build and scale companies across both the financial services and technology industries for the past 30 years, joining an industry leader like Ripple was an obvious choice given the convergence between finance and technology — and even more so in a region that’s at the cusp of accelerating payments innovation. I look forward to leading this talented team as we fuel the future of finance with RippleNet adoption in Southeast Asia and beyond.”
Southeast Asia transactions grew by 10x in 2020, driven by existing RippleNet customers and new connections
With the ongoing pandemic lowering the barriers to adoption of digital payments, Southeast Asia has emerged as the fastest growing region on RippleNet. In 2020, the number of deals signed in Southeast Asia more than doubled year-on-year and the region experienced a 10x year-on-year increase in RippleNet transactions.
The region’s unparalleled growth is being driven by strong momentum with existing RippleNet customers including Siam Commercial Bank (SCB) in Thailand. As the country’s largest bank in terms of market capital, SCB completed over half a million transactions on RippleNet in 2020 — a 300% growth for inbound remittance volume and 600% outbound remittance growth year-on-year. The bank’s SCB Easy app which runs on RippleNet, allows customers to send money in real-time and with low cost to family and friends abroad from their mobile phones.
SCB uses RippleNet to connect to financial institutions around the world, which opens up more corridors to serve more customers quickly and easily. In 2020, the bank established seven new connections on RippleNet — one of which is with BKK Forex, a fully licensed remittance and foreign exchange company in Singapore.
BKK Forex is connected to SCB and financial solutions provider DeeMoney via RippleNet Cloud to process SME and remittance payments from Singapore to Thailand, and is set to benefit more than 45,000 Thai nationals residing in Singapore who send money home frequently. Using RippleNet Cloud, BKK Forex can send and receive payments between financial institutions with one easy integration to process cross-border payments instantly, reliably and cost effectively—entirely on the cloud.
Joining BKK Forex and dozens of other financial institutions who are already running RippleNet Cloud is iRemit, the largest non-bank remittance service provider in the Philippines. As an early adopter of RippleNet’s On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) solution, iRemit leverages the digital asset XRP as a bridge currency to eliminate the need for pre-funding in cross-border payments. As a result, sending payments into one of the top remittance destinations globally is faster and cheaper than traditional payment systems.