For Ripple’s true believers, today is a very good day. Two major financial players — Western Union and the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority (SAMA) — recently revealed pilot programs using the Ripple’s xCurrent settlement system. Although Ripple already has similar programs with dozens of other banks and money transfer companies, SAMA and Western Union are […]

Speaking on yesterday on Bloomberg TV’s Street Smart, SecondMarket CEO Barry Silbert claimed that the bitcoin industry is nearing a positive “inflection point” after downward-trending six months. Silbert was on the show to discuss SecondMarket’s buyers’ syndicate for the U.S. Marshal Service’s auction of nearly 30,000 BTC seized from the Silk Road, but the conversation […]

In an interview yesterday with Bloomberg TV’s Street Smart, Western Union CEO Hikmet Ersek said his company would be open to implementing some form of bitcoin integration if the cryptocurrency is approved by regulatory authorities. When asked about how seriously Western Union viewed bitcoin as a threat to their business model, Ersek didn’t appear to […]

If there is a single real-world problem that bitcoin could solve, it’s the overwhelming cost of sending money internationally. According to investors like Barry Silbert, it may be bitcoin’s role as an alternative remittance provider that catapult the cryptocurrency into the mainstream. At the moment, remittance fees average between 7 to 9%, creating a real […]

In the first of a three-part series on CNN’s Fortune blog, Western Union CEO Hikmet Ersek discusses virtual currency from his company’s point of view. Given that bitcoin and other virtual currencies are often presented as extraordinarily disruptive technologies for the traditionally stable money-transfer business, it’s only natural for the hardly technophobic Ersek to weigh […]