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Former Ebay Chief Says Ripple, xRapid and XRP Can Play Pivotal Role in Growth of E-commerce

November 23, 2018

Former eBay chief product officer R.J. Pittman says Ripple, xRapid and XRP could play a major role in increasing the worldwide growth of e-commerce.

At Ripple’s recent Swell 2018 conference in San Francisco, Pittman noted that only about 10-20% of all transactions in the US currently happen online.

“We talk about the importance of payments in the future. We are nowhere close to hitting critical mass… Do we have the payment infrastructure? Do we have the scalability? Do we have the cost models in place? Because it’s going to get bitterly competitive when everything – every single transaction, every type – is being done digitally.”

Pittman says XRP, xCurrent and xRapid may have a transformative impact, calling them a potential lubricant in the global machine powering cross-border payments for companies like eBay.

“The buyer wants to know: Did the seller ship the goods? The seller wants to know: Did the buyer pay? Where’s the money? Who’s holding it? And you sort of have PayPal in the middle in most countries, but not in all. And it’s sort of this mysterious guessing game. And it was one of the biggest call drivers in the contact center. We had thousands of people in the contact center answering the mystery questions of where’s my goods and where’s the payment. And even when the buyer did pay, by the way, it didn’t necessarily mean that the seller had the money and it was settled. There was a whole other level of mystery of exactly when that was going to happen.

And so, as I’m listening to the narrative here and sort of the value proposition of blockchain ledgers, certainly Ripple and xCurrent and xRapid, these are the steps and absolutely the right direction certainly for a business like ours, which is a multitude of buyers and sellers, with merchants in 190 countries. We need new solutions because, as I mentioned earlier, we only need to move the needle or move the dial on some of that friction problem in very small increments to have a transformative effect in the financial architecture of our company – or of eBay – we should say.”

According to Pittman, rather than being afraid of change, payment platforms and e-commerce companies could see major growth thanks to crypto and blockchain technology.

“The inefficiencies in the processing chains for payments, whether it’s global payments across a border or even credit card settlements here in the us – it’s incredibly antiquated. It’s cost ridden. And there are grounds for so much innovation.

And all of the incumbents shouldn’t be fearing losing any of the nest eggs they’ve had in the last several decades. Quite the opposite. It’s about sort of shedding the legacy and opening the aperture to extraordinary growth opportunities, where the size of the pie is going to grow 5x, 10x, if you look at the numbers in terms of just online penetration today. We have so much room to grow.”

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