Western Union will not be introducing cryptocurrency exchange any time soon

Western Union, the world's largest currency exchange platform will not be introducing digital currency exchange service any time soon, says Hikmet Ersek, the CEO of Western Union at the Economic Club of New York on Wednesday, 13th June.

Ersek, nevertheless agrees that cryptocurrencies are the new future digital currency, but people must understand the fact that only real paper money is and always will be used by everyone in daily life matters. People won't be buying groceries or paying the hospital fees in cryptos. He really pushed the fact here that the world depends on real money, not digital by stating:

“The consumers tell us what they want. People aren’t paying their hospital bills in cryptos.”

Ersek has also mentioned quite a few centralized backs that are unwilling to introduce digital currency to their platform: the reason being that a country's economy and strength depends on flags, constitutions, borders, and currencies, real currency and not digitalized. He said:

Nations are built on flags, constitutions, borders, and currencies. And no central bank home to a reserve currency would be willing to give that kind of control away.

Earlier in February, Western Union had been testing Ripple for money transactions. Ripple, a blockchain company, is based on becoming the go-to service provider for global money transfers. Many other banks and currency exchange companies had been testing Ripple's service.

Western Union later confirmed that it was also “experimenting with Ripple for settling transactions and for capital optimization” according to Fortune (http://fortune.com/2018/02/14/ripple-xrp-western-union-money-transfers/), an American multinational business magazine. Garlinghouse also believed that XRP will be easier to trade due to its higher transaction rate. Furthermore, XRP is being used to transfer payments worldwide as it is more convenient being a smaller currency.

A Ripple spokesperson said:

“We’ve been testing different products with Western Union for a while. We’re excited about our work towards a pilot implementation of xRapid, which uses XRP in payment flows.”

Western Union had been looking for ways to introduce easy money transferring, but “testing” cryptocurrencies don't mean they would be implemented any time soon.