Following it’s acquisition of a corporation with a New York trust charter, Ripple plans to broaden its permitted business operations in the United States and maybe transcend its well-known function as a payments network. The agreement, which represents Ripple’s second recent acquisition of a custody company, still needs to be approved by the New York regulator.
In a continuous effort to broaden its regulatory licencing throughout the United States, Ripple announced on Tuesday that it has reached an agreement to purchase Standard Custody & Trust Co. in order to get a New York trust charter.
Ripple, a global payments startup, is still attempting to expand its reach in the United States, despite its concentration on foreign markets and its well-publicized legal dispute with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which has largely ended in the regulator’s favour thus far. The company that Ripple is purchasing will be able to provide more in-house services, including to financial organisations looking to tokenize assets, thanks to the limited purpose trust charter it holds in New York. The company is attempting to expand its reach beyond its well-known payments network and into other financial products where blockchain technology can help their institutional clients.
“Our goal is to provide these financial institutions with an increasing number of these infrastructure components,” Ripple President Monica Long stated in a CoinDesk interview. “We see this as giving us a lot of flexibility.”
She described it as a long-term endeavour and mentioned that Ripple is still working to obtain the remaining licences necessary for money transmission in the United States.
The agreement with Standard Custody & Trust expands Ripple’s stable by bringing in a cryptocurrency custody and settlement company. Ripple has declined to reveal the specifics of the agreement, which is still pending clearance from the New York Department of Financial Services. Customers would not need to go to an outside partner and may keep custody with Ripple as a result.
It is well known in the US that Ripple and the SEC squared off in federal court over the regulator’s claims that XRP was a securities. Higher courts will still hear the matter even if one judge has mostly decided in favour of Ripples. Long stated that the company’s reluctance to enter the U.S. is more due to the regulatory uncertainties around digital assets than it is to that particular conflict.
“But the U.S. is a major market, and we believe it’s possible for the U.S. to emerge as a leader in driving innovation,” she stated.
This latest Ripple acquisition comes after an agreement from the previous year wherein Ripple purchased another cryptocurrency custody firm, Metaco