Hikmet Ersek, Western Union’s CEO, Frustrated with Ripple

Western Union has not seen the alleged benefits of the cost-saving potential of its products eventhough Ripple champions it. Hikmet Ersek, Western Union’s CEO, talked about his firm’s current experiments with XRP, a digital currency by the Ripple Ledger, according to an interview published on Wednesday by Fortune.

“We are constantly belittled that Western Union is not cost effective … but we did not see that part of the efficiency yet during our tests,” he said. “The practical matter is it’s still too costly.”

After Ripple’s own cryptographer, David Schwartz, apparently revealed that the Firm’s Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)  isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be for cross-border payment processing, maybe Ersek shouldn’t be too stunned. Functioning at scale and guaranteeing data security remain challenges for true DLT systems.

“I will acknowledge that we have not gotten there yet,” said Schwartz. “What we hear from a good number of our customers is that it is crucial to keep their dealings private, process thousands each second, and support every type of cryptocurrency and asset possible.”

Notwithstanding, Western Union has not given up yet.

Ersek said he does not want to get rid of the XRP tests, describing Ripple’s team as “very innovative” and made up of “good people.” He recognized the fact that the pilot was in its conception and, to date, has comprised of only a few transactions over a limited period of time (well, to be fair, it’s been six months).

Rome was not built in a day, however, with the XRP market cap hanging around $20 billion, it would be nice to have some results.