Ripple

Ripple provides financial institutions with infrastructure for operating across traditional and digital assets from one partner, covering instant money movement across stablecoins, crypto and local currencies, and custody with the governance to launch and scale digital asset services.

Selling to institutions rather than consumers is the positioning that distinguishes it from most companies in this space. The customer is a bank or payment provider that must satisfy regulators, auditors and its own risk committee, so governance and compliance are the product rather than features attached to it.

Custody is the capability institutions cannot proceed without. Holding digital assets on behalf of clients carries requirements about key management, segregation and recovery that an institution cannot meet by adopting consumer tooling, and it is usually the first thing built rather than the last.

Cross-border payment is the original use case and it remains the clearest. Moving money between countries through correspondent banking is slow and opaque, and settling in a digital asset addresses both, provided the currency can be reliably converted at each end, which is where the local liquidity matters more than the technology.