Ripple is sharpening its European expansion strategy around regulated payments infrastructure, stablecoins and institutional digital asset services, with recently secured e-money permissions in the UK and Luxembourg positioned as key building blocks. Speaking on FinTech Futures’ “What the FinTech?” podcast, Cassie Craddock, managing director for the UK and Europe at Ripple, said the company is using licensing, acquisitions and its RLUSD stablecoin to deepen its role with banks and financial institutions across the region.
Ripple Leans on Licenses to Scale in Europe
Ripple has obtained an e-money license and money laundering registration in the UK with the Financial Conduct Authority, as well as an e-money license in Luxembourg with the CSSF regulator. Craddock framed those approvals as part of a longer licensing strategy designed to wrap Ripple’s payments and digital asset infrastructure in regulated services for institutional clients. Ripple now holds 75 licenses globally, with the UK and Luxembourg approvals among the latest additions.
“So we are exceptionally excited about our regulatory approvals here in the UK and in Europe,” Craddock said. “We announced that we obtained our e-money license and our MLR registration in the UK with the FCA. And also we recently announced that we had acquired our e-money license out of Luxembourg with the CSSF regulator.” She said the licenses allow Ripple to provide a “regulatory wrapper” around payment services that clients want delivered on their behalf.
The company’s European footprint has become a larger part of its commercial strategy. Craddock said London is Ripple’s second-largest office after its San Francisco headquarters, with more than 200 employees across the UK and European business, and a new London office planned. Ripple has also opened a Luxembourg office, maintains smaller offices in Iceland and Ireland, and uses Geneva as a hub for its custody product and engineering teams.
Craddock said the licensing push reflects demand from banks and financial institutions that want access to blockchain-based payments without managing the operational complexity themselves. “They wanted to be able to partner with a trusted advisor, a partner that they could rely on to manage liquidity, to manage custody technology, to manage payment infrastructure, and to provide them all of these benefits to their customers in a regulated way,” she said. That positioning is central to Ripple’s pitch as European banks move from experimentation toward production digital asset use cases.
Ripple is also integrating acquisitions into that regional strategy. Craddock said Ripple spent more than $2.5 billion last year acquiring businesses including prime brokerage Hidden Road, treasury management platform GTreasury, Palisade and Rail. She described the goal as bringing those capabilities under one roof to support a broader institutional stack covering custody, tokenization, payments, prime brokerage and treasury management.
The expansion comes as Europe’s MiCA framework has encouraged more structured digital asset planning among financial institutions. Craddock said Ripple is seeing stronger appetite in the region, particularly among banks that began with custody and are now evaluating trading, payments and tokenization. She said Ripple wants to serve as the infrastructure layer behind those strategies rather than simply as a single-product vendor.
RLUSD Takes Center Stage in Payments Strategy
Ripple’s stablecoin strategy now sits alongside its licensing and payments business. Craddock said RLUSD, Ripple’s USD stablecoin launched in late 2024, has reached a $1.5 billion market cap and ranks as a top-10 USD stablecoin. She said Ripple issued RLUSD in response to customer demand and designed it as a compliance-first stablecoin, issued out of New York and regulated by the NYDFS.
“Ripple’s in a unique position because not only are we a stablecoin issuer, we’re also providing stablecoin rails through our Ripple payments business as well,” Craddock said. “The reason why we created this stablecoin was a couple of reasons. Firstly, the stablecoin market is fast-growing.” She added that RLUSD can be used inside Ripple’s cross-border payment flows and as infrastructure for on- and off-ramps into the XRP Ledger ecosystem.
Craddock pointed to cross-border payments as the clearest near-term use case for stablecoins, especially where weekends, holidays and pre-funding requirements create liquidity pressure. She described a conversation with a long-standing customer sending payments into the Philippines. “Before stablecoins and before partnering with Ripple, we used to fear bank holidays and the weekends because they had to pre-fund their accounts many days in advance, which became a liquidity challenge for them,” she said, relaying the customer’s experience.
Ripple says it has processed more than $100 billion in payments to date, and Craddock said stablecoins can make settlement available “24 by 7, 365” while improving speed, transparency and cost. The company is also seeing banks show more direct interest in stablecoin payment strategies. SocGen, which has worked with Ripple on custody, issued its EURCV stablecoin on the XRP Ledger and is exploring payment use cases, Craddock said.
Beyond payments, Ripple is positioning stablecoins as connective infrastructure for tokenized assets and capital markets workflows. Craddock said stablecoins can help investors move in and out of tokenized instruments, including tokenized bonds and money market funds. She also pointed to Ripple’s work with Aviva around tokenized assets and repo use cases as an example of how digital asset infrastructure is moving into capital markets.
Craddock said interoperability remains a major requirement for scaling blockchain-based financial services. “In order to be able to actually deliver that seamless customer experience, we need traditional financial systems and DeFi protocols to be able to be interoperable together and to work in a multi-chain world,” she said. “But also we need to be very mindful of fragmentation of regulation around the globe. In order to be able to really see the benefits of kind of a truly global adoption, we need regulators to be more collaborative.”
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