Title of Project: MBA+ Consultant for Ripple: Analyzing the competitive and financial landscapes in Nigeria, Rwanda, Australia, and the UK to find strategic partnerships for Ripple’s blockchain enabled international money transfer service.
Aims: The purpose of this project was to provide 3 potential strategic partnership for Ripple to enter from prioritized locations as provided by Ripple – Nigeria, Australia, and the UK.
Background: The standard for the international movement of money is an outdated, unreliable, and inefficient system. Primarily driven by the issue of liquidity, global systems require many parties (sometimes 4+) that exchange money and delay processing times between the sending and receiving parties. By removing the middle exchanges Ripple provides cheap, fast, and reliable payment solutions. These solutions are dependent on key relationships with financial institutions in foreign countries. The ideal partners will have excellent payout experience, an adherence to the Ripple rule standards, rapid partnership onboarding capabilities, and a willingness to work with cryptocurrency technology.
The number of financially excluded people in Nigeria is increasing meaning more people do not have access to financial services than ever before. Remittances are very important to developing countries – within Nigeria remittance inflows were 7.4x greater than foreign aid and for many families within Africa remittances serve as a lifeline – making affordability and access to remittances imperative. Broadening access to financial services will mobilize greater household savings, expand the class of entrepreneurs, and enable more people to invest in themselves, their families, and their communities.
Method: Performed financial landscape analysis and regulatory landscape analysis for each of the countries identified. Identified potential strategic partnerships within each of the countries and used a scorecard to determine the best options within each country. Performed an internal analysis on each of the best options for partnerships identifying 7 strategic partners for Ripple (list withheld for firm privacy).
Conclusions: After providing a thorough analysis with regard to each specific country and strategic partnership opportunities for Ripple, we presented our research to executive leadership throughout the organization.
Discussion: This project was completely outside of the realm of healthcare and I enjoyed that aspect of it, but that meant I had to learn about an entire industry within the finance technology space from scratch. I would highly recommend doing an MBA+ project as a way to get hands on experience working with real companies trying to solve real problems.