EN | Building the Rails How Ripple s $3 Billion Bet Is Reshaping Finance From São Paulo | MERGE SP

So, [snorts] now we have a fireside chat. Um we have this uh an interesting conversation about building the rails. How how Ripple 3 billion bet is reshaping financial from São Paulo to the world. Please welcome to the stage Monica Long, pre- president at Ripple and Mariana Mariana journalist at Exame. Well, hi everyone.

So, I don't know if you knew, but Ripple's made a 3 billion dollar bet in reshaping finance. So, that's what we're talking about today. And I hope you like the conversation with Monica Long, president of Ripple. So, ready to start? Absolutely.

Thanks for uh doing this with me, Mariana. Thank you to Merge for having me. Yeah, thank you. So, Ripple has deployed 3 billion dollars in acquisitions to build financial infrastructure across custody, brokerage, and payments. So, what was the strategic vision behind this aggressive M&A push and how does it reshape Ripple's role in the global financial system helping the company to continue its expansion globally?

So, many of you, if you've been in this space, you might hear or think of Ripple as the old guard. This company was founded in 2012 and we've been through many chapters. Um I joined in 2013 and I can say that 2025 was by far our biggest year. So, we made four major acquisitions um and we just had our biggest year of growth um for a lot of reasons. Uh so, to speak to the acquisitions, uh we had kind of a two-pronged strategy to M&A last year.

One of which was to complement or to actually augment our digital asset infrastructure. So, what Ripple really does, for those who may not know us, is we provide end-to-end digital asset infrastructure for the enterprise. So, we primarily serve fintechs and financial institutions and these capabilities allow them to collect, hold, swap, and pay out all forms of digital assets and, you know, alongside fiat currencies. So, two of the acquisitions, one was um in stablecoin payments. Stablecoin payments was the the theme of 2025, I think, in the world of digital assets.

Um and then the other was uh a wallet solution to complement Ripple already has a custody solution that really was built from the ground up to serve banks. And you can think of it almost like a bank vault, you know, for really secure cold storage with, you know, bank grade uh levels of uh control and governance over their policy engine. Um but this wallet solution, uh which was actually developed by two former Ripple engineers who went off and founded this company, um is is really much more suitable for the fintech that has to securely store assets, but also um have, you know, transaction throughput, be able to move those assets uh for for payments and other use cases. The second side of the strategy was entering new areas or new um business lines that could make use of this digital asset infrastructure. One in prime brokerage, so we acquired a company called Hidden Road, now called Ripple Prime.

They're the largest non-bank prime brokerage in the world. They serve more than 300 large institutions like hedge funds. And um there's a lot in the world of uh post-trade settlement, clearing and settlement, that could be made a lot more efficient by using blockchain. Uh so, as as like a starting example of how they're using our infrastructure, they are uh making available to their clients our stablecoin RLUSD as a form of 24/7 always-on uh collateral uh that they can post as opposed to US dollars, which are subject to, of course, the banking rails. Um and then the other kind of major acquisition that brought us into a new line of business was in the treasury management space.

So, Ripple Treasury um is a company that uh serves more than 1,000 corporates around the world. And the treasury management uh software, for those who don't know, this is kind of the centralized hub for the corporate treasury to do all of their money management. So, this is incredibly powerful entry point for corporates to do key functions like payments and asset management. And so, we're we're seeking to make those um those problem sets or those opportunities a lot more efficient and more powerful for them using the infrastructure. Okay, and you mentioned the old guard and it remembers me that crypto it was like in a gray area when talking about regulation for a long time and Ripple had a lot of trouble with that.

So, we had a lot of regulatory clarity, especially in the US, in the last few years and it feels like you're finally free to do whatever you want to do at Ripple. So, how do you see that and how regulatory clarity uh can help you uh with all that M&A strategy? I I probably shouldn't uh call myself or Ripple old, huh? That's not good branding. [laughter] Um but uh I I you know, uh Silvio Picado, our MD for Latin America, anyone who's in Brazil knows Silvio.

Uh he says crypto years are like dog years. So, maybe that's more what I mean. Like in dog years, yeah. It's been a lot of years. Um the US is a night and day shift in terms of uh regulatory clarity and thus night and day shift in terms of institutional um appetite to to adopt these technologies.

Um I would say kind of like the the bright line last year was the Genius Act. So, this is the first time the US uh created legislation that provided clarity around at least stablecoins. Now working on the Clarity Act this year. But that was really important for validation of the technology and the whole industry for traditional finance to be able to say, "Okay, this is here to stay and we can we can use these technologies in a way that is approved by our regulators and they have that clearance." That was it's like a green light.

It's it was really really important. And um I mean, I could say at a at a macro level, I know things like B2B stablecoin payment volume more than doubled last year from 2024 to 2025 um as well as uh assets under custody by uh institutions, digital assets under custody by institutions. Um and within our business, I could say that we saw like dozens of requests for proposals coming in from banks, especially in the US, for our custody products. So, I think that's a pretty good sign that um you know, the institutions are coming. Okay, and Latin America and especially Brazil is one of the top countries and crypto adoption and stablecoins adoption.

But how Ripple uh intend to fit this M&A strategy at Latin America and Brazil? Yes, uh Brazil is a really really exciting place to be um if you're in in crypto. Uh and uh like, you know, I think last year uh at a at, you know, a whole global scale, some of the most of the growth in or sorry, a lot of growth in uh stablecoin payment volume was coming from Brazil. And I can say within our business, Brazil has been our market of the highest growth for our stablecoin payment uh products. Um so, I I think that that is really exciting.

Um you and I I I think, you know, Brazil kind of has always been uh leader in innovation when it comes to open finance, open banking, PIX. Um and and you see this really nice partnership between private industry and the government um having, you know, clarity over who's your regulator, the Central Bank of Brazil, and the Central Bank being really um kind of cooperative or uh you know, really seeking to understand deeply what the industry use cases are from private industry is really valuable and it and what comes of it is clarity around here legi- uh regulation. So, with the VASP license kind of being uh shared in terms of what the rules will be, we're we're applying for that ourselves so that we can, you know, operate in a compliant way here. Um and I think that combination of like innovation in the DNA, uh click regu- regulatory clarity, also means you see institutions being early adopters in Brazil. Um all of the, you know, major players like Itaú and BTG, etc.

Um they're certainly leaning into this space and uh so, uh we see a lot of opportunity. Yeah, and 2 years ago you launched your own stablecoin, RLUSD, and me and Silvio always joke about how difficult it is for us Portuguese speakers to to say RLUSD.

I've gotten some some friendly constructive feedback that it does not work and that we [laughter] need a new name for it. He calls it Ripple Dollars, which I think that's that's cool. We'll call it Ripple Dollars.

Ripple Dollars. So, a new rebranding just announced.

[laughter]

But how's it going uh 2 years ago and so far? And what can you tell about plans, future plans for especially for Latin and Brazil use cases? Yes, so um we launched this stablecoin, RLUSD, um at the tail end of 2024. So, in 2025 and and I'll say like a a reason we launched it is of course, you know, I we just describing our business. A lot of it has to do with money movement and US dollar stable coins are a key kind of form of currency that everyone's using for for money movement.

And so we wanted to provide our clients with stable coin offering that they could really trust and like we could stand behind. And so when we launched it, we launched it with a New York Trust license regulated by New York DFS. And then we've also since applied for the OCC national trust charter which we've been granted approval of that approval there. So we want our our clients, especially institutional clients, to know that, you know, as the the token is always one-to-one backed by US dollar and US dollar equivalents. Assets are segregated in a bankruptcy remote account.

And we have monthly audits from the likes of Deloitte. So those are markers that, you know, our clients know they can trust. And in the first year, you know, it's climbed to be steadily in the top five of US dollar stable coins that are fiat backed. And you know, we we've seen a lot of distribution on key exchanges like Binance and Kraken and Bitso and Mercado Bitcoin and Ripio. So we're really pleased with the uptake and we've gotten great feedback from our clients.

Yeah, and last year all we talked in the events like that were stable coins and stable coins as a product itself and has a lot of use use case of course. But I think now it's time for us to talk about stable coins and beyond and the products that we can develop over stable coins like maybe treasury management, corporate finance, or even capital markets. How do you see that coming? Yeah, those are really great examples. So I would say we're we're seeing, you know, more traditional kind of cross-border payments.

We work with, you know, great partners here in Brazil like Banco Genial that's using our infrastructure for US dollar clearing. So so that's kind of on the more, you know, traditional cross-border payment side. We are seeing more and more of the use case for internal treasury management. So companies, be it, you know, payment companies or banks or corporates needing to just more efficiently move money across their different entities around the world. We we have a client called Corpay out of the out of Canada that's that's using our our products for that.

Um and I think that will be a really big use case through our Ripple Treasury product. Remember reaching those thousand plus corporates, that's their whole life is making sure that, you know, they're managing their their treasury as efficiently as possible. An area that I'm really excited about that's emerging and you know, we're kind of running some really exciting pilots in this area is um using stable coins and other tokenized funds for repo. And I think this can go for other types of collateral management in capital markets, but taking repo as an example, we work with a bank in Singapore called DBS and they Franklin Templeton is also a partner. They have a money market fund, a tokenized money market fund called the Benji.

So DBS will accept that as a form of collateral which is, you know, huge for for the case of repo. We're also working with Aviva Investors out of the UK if anyone knows that company. Um So I think this is you're going to see much more talk about collateral management and applying, you know, blockchain, tokenized funds and and tokenized money like stable coins in the world of capital markets. Yeah, and you've been in Latin America for a few years now and as you said, it's a region that every company should want to be. But what makes the region so fertile for stable coin and crypto businesses?

What do you think about it? Yeah, well, I mean I think it's, you know, for Brazil, there's a lot of cross-border trade that goes on, you know, through various import export businesses, merchants that have vendor relationships or vice versa with China or Hong Kong. So these are areas where there are you know, maybe underserved or or misserved by the existing system. Their rates, you know, FX rates and that kind of thing are too high. Um how long it takes for funds to arrive to whoever they're trying to pay can be really unpredictable or, you know, frequently breaks down.

There's a lot of failures. Um so I think the the pain point with the existing kind of old system, the traditional system is really high here. You can feel it. Um and I mean there's also many retail use cases. I was just talking about B2B and corporate, but I think it goes for retail as well.

So I I think there's that. I think there is something in the water, so to speak, or in the DNA where there is a more of an appetite to be on the bleeding edge or be the innovators, the first to leap into new technology and to into try it out. So I think there's that going for it. And then also, you know, you really I can't understate how important it is to have regulatory clarity. It's really everything and I think I mean I've been doing this for a really long time and thinking back to the days where we thought, "Gee, like this product, this technology is so obvious that banks should be using this for more efficient settlement.

Like this is going to be so easy." But it really the long pole in the tent has been regulatory clarity and connecting blockchain networks with the traditional networks. So systems like PIX cuz you for for usability blockchain can't be this foreign language to institutions or to people. It has to just kind of work within the way that, you know, the ways that they trust and know-how. Yeah, and last but not least, stable coins have called the attention of banks, traditional finance institutions so all over the world.

So how does Ripple plan to uh be like the main character of this new industry and this new financial infrastructure that's backed by stable coins? The main character in the in the story, I like that.

[laughter]

Well, well, I mean we we really do think that well uh We believe we've always talked about like what blockchain's going to do to the world with for the world is to enable an internet of value and we've always talked about Ripple's role as being a part of that picture and we do think we're a main character in especially serving the enterprise and serving institutions. Because we take a, you know, compliance first approach. So we have more than 75 licenses. We're we're very regulated all around the world and we've done that intentionally. It's, you know, the hard way to do it, but we think it's the right way.

And we really are the the only game in town that can provide like kind of the whole end-to-end of digital asset life cycle management under one roof from a from a partner that isn't going anywhere. We've been as we said, we've been around for 13 years. Okay, so our time is up and thank you, Monica. It was a great conversation. I hope everyone liked Thank you.

Thank you so much. Thank you.