Accelerating Financial Inclusion Through Technology
I believe that technology, when built and scaled right, can have a profoundly positive impact on humanity and improve people’s lives. In leading engineering teams at Amazon for 15 years, I witnessed first hand, customer focused innovations at scale that provided people with core necessities essential to how they live. With the global pandemic, it has become more apparent that we are able to fulfill a critical role for communities around the world and help them feel secure during an uncertain time by delivering essentials to their doorsteps.
When I consider the standout companies and industry leaders of the 21st century, it’s hard not to think about the journey that enabled this scale and one of the key technological developments behind each of these stories — the internet.
There are several parallels in Ripple’s vision to enable the Internet of Value (IoV) – a world where money moves like information on the internet. By building the heavy lifting infrastructure, it has the potential to not only create new opportunities in business but to impact billions of people and their daily lives. Just as the internet was the driving force behind many of today’s leading companies, blockchain has the potential to fundamentally change our current financial system and bring billions of unbanked people into the financial ecosystem and accelerate financial inclusion globally.
Over the past several years, financial institutions have shifted their strategic focus to offering delightful customer experience as their key to success. However, the current global payments infrastructure does not meet today’s business or consumer demands. For instance, the cost of remittances remains high and it underscores the gaps that exist in the current financial system where those who have the least, often pay the most.
On average the fee to send $200 is $14. For someone living on $200, putting that money back into their pocket isn’t just an added bonus — it can be life-changing. Ripple’s financial network RippleNet, and the RippleX open developer platform unlock the power of blockchain and digital asset technology allowing financial institutions, startups, founders and entrepreneurs to dramatically improve the speed, cost and reliability of how people transact around the world.
One of the most important lessons that I carry with me from my time at Amazon is the idea of “divine discontent” when it comes to serving customers. Customers’ expectations and insistence on the highest standards remains constant in an ever changing world. In any role or in any new project, I look to first deeply understand the customer. Once you understand the customer needs, challenges and their heartbreak it’s impossible to stay quiet. This understanding is key to acting boldly to overcome insurmountable challenges and addressing unmet customer needs from building a better product to advocating for them in the boardroom.
Teams and companies that inherently know this and are able to put it into practice each day are the most successful. They don’t rest on their laurels, they remain humble and vocally self-critical with a love of learning.
I believe in order to deliver complete solutions for customers, teams must have customer obsession, engineering strength, invention strength and operational rigor. At its best, technology serves as the backbone for innovative solutions at a global scale. When technology is agile and scalable, it can drive invention and help realize the strategic vision. When it’s not, it will slow down innovation and create inertia.
Ripple’s engineering team has set a high standard of engineering quality to gain the confidence of global customers. The potential of this technology is far-reaching and in many ways, we are only at the beginning.
I view engineering as a strategic member of the product and business teams, helping to build architecturally sound systems aligned with customer and business needs. These principles are ones I bring with me into my new role, and ones that I’ve already seen at play in my short time at Ripple.
By leveraging cutting-edge technology with blockchain and digital asset technology, Ripple is solving real problems that impact everyone, everywhere.
Industry leading technology, Rapid growth and scale makes for an unpredictable path. As a team, we keep learning and getting better at being prepared for whatever comes next. Despite the sometimes unpredictable terrain, our team remains laser focused and are confident that we will come out stronger on the other side. There is no roadmap for where we’re going, we enjoy the journey. Innovation is part of our DNA!
Designed and custom-built by Ripplers, our product innovations use a variety of technologies including front-end to highest scale backend services, blockchain, data platform and advanced machine learning.
We’re looking for builders to help us innovate the future globally. Check out Ripple’s Careers page.
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