Brad Garlinghouse has spent his tenure as Ripple’s chief executive arguing that moving money across borders should be as fast and as simple as sending an email. Under his leadership, Ripple has built its payments business around XRP, the digital asset native to the XRP Ledger, and positioned both as alternatives to the slow, costly correspondent-banking rails that still carry much of the world’s international payment traffic.
Who is Brad Garlinghouse?
Garlinghouse is a veteran technology executive who held senior roles at Yahoo! and AOL before joining Ripple, where he serves as CEO. He has become one of the most visible spokespeople in the digital-asset industry, and his public comments on payments, regulation, and the role of XRP are closely watched by banks, fintech companies, and crypto investors alike.
Ripple’s stated mission is to enable fast, secure, and low-cost financial transactions worldwide. The company describes this ambition as the Internet of Value: a world in which money moves as quickly as information does today.
Understanding cross-border payments
Cross-border payments are transactions between parties in different countries. They let companies pay overseas suppliers and employees, and they allow individuals to send money to family abroad or buy from foreign merchants.
Traditional cross-border transactions face persistent problems: high fees, slow processing, and limited transparency. A payment routed through the correspondent-banking system can pass through multiple intermediaries before it settles, which makes it hard to track a transfer’s status or predict its final cost. Garlinghouse has long pointed to the economics behind that friction. In a CNBC interview in 2019, he acknowledged that global banks like Citi make “an automatic $8 billion on cross-border payments” — a measure of how much incumbent institutions earn from the status quo that Ripple wants to disrupt.
XRP as a bridge asset
Within Ripple’s payment products, XRP functions as a bridge currency: an asset that can stand between two fiat currencies so a payment can move without pre-funded accounts on both ends. That design is meant to free up the capital that banks would otherwise have to park in nostro accounts around the world.
Garlinghouse has been careful to describe where XRP fits in a broader, multi-asset payments strategy. He has said that XRP may be the best bridge asset for some cross-border payments, while a stablecoin could solve other customer needs. He has also explained that XRP is targeted at crypto cross-border payments and small-value machine-to-machine payments because of its speed and low costs.
His most attention-grabbing prediction concerns the scale of the opportunity: Garlinghouse has said that XRP could account for 14% of the cross-border payment volume handled by SWIFT within five years.
RippleNet: Ripple’s payments network
RippleNet is Ripple’s global network of financial institutions using its technology to move money internationally. It is designed as an alternative to the traditional SWIFT system that banks worldwide rely on, and it emphasizes near real-time settlement, low operational and liquidity costs, and end-to-end payment tracking so that institutions can see a payment’s status and fees throughout the process. The network supports both fiat currencies and digital assets, and its modular design lets financial institutions integrate it with their existing systems.
Regulation and the SEC lawsuit
Ripple and XRP have drawn scrutiny from regulators around the world, most notably in a lawsuit brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over whether XRP should be classified as a security — a dispute with real implications for how widely XRP can be adopted. Ripple’s response has been to lean into compliance: the company has implemented know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering procedures, worked with authorities across jurisdictions, and advocated for clearer regulatory frameworks for digital assets.
Partnerships and real-world use
Ripple’s technology has been put to work by established financial brands. Santander built its One Pay FX service on Ripple technology to offer faster, more transparent international payments. MoneyGram used Ripple’s On-Demand Liquidity service for real-time foreign exchange settlements, cutting costs and improving efficiency. American Express is also among the companies Ripple has partnered with. These collaborations are the clearest demonstration of how Ripple’s approach translates into working products for cross-border payments.
The technology behind the XRP Ledger
The XRP Ledger is a decentralized cryptographic ledger maintained by a peer-to-peer network of servers. Instead of energy-intensive proof-of-work mining, it uses a consensus algorithm that is faster and more energy-efficient, which allows quick transaction processing at scale. Security features include multi-signing capabilities, a unique node list, and a distributed agreement protocol, and Ripple has explored quantum-resistant protocols as a way to future-proof the technology against advances in quantum computing.
Garlinghouse’s vision for the future
Garlinghouse’s near-term goals for Ripple center on expanding the RippleNet ecosystem and widening XRP adoption in cross-border payments, including deeper integration with traditional banking partners. His long-term aspiration is the Internet of Value, in which digital assets are woven into global finance and money moves as freely as data.
That future, as Ripple describes it, is multi-asset. The company’s RLUSD stablecoin now sits alongside XRP in its lineup, and potential integration with central bank digital currencies could streamline global banking operations further. Investors weighing XRP still face a mixed picture: institutional adoption, regulatory progress, and technological advancement on one side; regulatory risk, market volatility, and competitive pressure on the other.
The bottom line
Garlinghouse’s recent comments sketch a more precise role for XRP than the sweeping rhetoric of crypto’s earlier years: a bridge asset for the cross-border payments where it is the best tool, with stablecoins and other instruments handling the rest. Regulatory questions and competition from both incumbent banks and other networks remain genuine obstacles. Whether XRP ultimately captures the share of global payment flows Garlinghouse predicts, his strategy has made cross-border payments the defining test of what the asset can do.
