MoneyGram (MGI, $1.45) to get upto $50 million investment from Ripple

Shares of MoneyGram International soared on Tuesday, following blockchain startup Ripple’s plans to invest in the company.

MoneyGram is a money transfer services company based in the U.S. Ripple has agreed to buy $30 million of MoneyGram's fresh shares at $4.10 a share.  It might also  purchase another $20 million at its discretion at a minimum of $4.10.

MoneyGram’s services encompass 200 countries and territories, with around $600 billion processed in the global remittance market.

Under the terms of the deal, MoneyGram will use Ripple’s XRP  technology to process cross-border transfers of digital funds for at least two years.

With nearly $900 million in total debt, MoneyGram indicated that it is close to a refinancing of a loan and revolving credit facilities following the investment. 

For Ripple, the deal could potentially spell a critical opportunity for it to prove the effectiveness of its crypto technology in lowering time and costs associated with fund transfers. It’s been a challenge for Ripple’s XRP crypto-currency in gathering steam in the digital coin space. As of Monday, XRP was trading at  a little less than 43 cents a coin. 

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Sergey Savastiouk|Expert

Sergey Savastiouk, Ph.D. has a degree in Applied Mathematics from Moscow University and has extensive experience as an entrepreneur, investor, manager, and mathematician. His professional expertise is in applied mathematics, mathematical modeling, system and pattern analysis, and software and hardware system integration. He has served as the CEO of several hi-tech start-up companies and nonprofit organizations, which has given him proven capabilities in business strategy for high-tech start-up companies, market assessment, company formation, team building, product development, marketing, and sales. He has published numerous articles in journals and magazines on related fields. As a retail investor, he spent 15 years developing his proprietary trading and quantitative algorithms (now Tickeron’s A.I.), which brought him significant returns in trading the stock market. His current work and goal in founding Tickeron is to bring professional, sophisticated stock market analysis capabilities to retail investors via an easy-to-use interface.