Ripple Expands African Footprint Through Strategic Partnership with Absa Bank

Ripple’s international custody community now spans a number of continents, with Absa turning into its first main institutional associate in Africa.

Ripple has introduced a strategic partnership with South Africa’s Absa Financial institution. Below the settlement, Absa will combine Ripple’s custody expertise to handle tokenized belongings, together with cryptocurrencies.

With this partnership, Absa positive aspects entry to Ripple’s institutional-grade expertise, whereas the latter advances its broader mission of integrating digital belongings into mainstream monetary operations throughout Africa.

Institutional Digital Asset Custody

The most recent growth marks Ripple’s first main custody collaboration in Africa, which comes at a time of accelerating demand amongst emerging-market monetary establishments for compliant digital asset options.

The partnership strengthens the San Francisco-headquartered firm’s footprint on the continent, constructing on earlier initiatives corresponding to supporting Africa-focused funds platform Chipper Money with crypto-enabled cost instruments and facilitating the launch of its USD-backed stablecoin RLUSD within the area.

In an official assertion, Robyn Lawson, Head of Digital Product, Custody, at Absa Company and Funding Banking, said,

“As we proceed to innovate and reply to the evolving monetary ecosystem, we recognise the significance of offering our clients with safe, compliant, and strong custody options for his or her digital belongings. Ripple’s custody answer permits us to leverage confirmed and trusted expertise that meets the very best safety and operational requirements. Collectively, we will ship the following era of economic infrastructure to our clients.”

The corporate’s international custody community now spans Europe, the Center East, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and Africa, and serves monetary establishments navigating the panorama of blockchain and tokenized belongings.

Ripple’s 2025 New Worth Report revealed that 64% of finance leaders within the Center East and Africa cite sooner funds and settlement instances as an necessary issue for adopting blockchain-based currencies in cross-border flows.

You may additionally like:

Different Key Developments

The transfer follows Ripple’s partnership with Bahrain Fintech Bay final week to advance Bahrain’s digital belongings ecosystem. The principle goal behind that is to give attention to growing proofs-of-concept and pilot initiatives in blockchain, cross-border funds, digital belongings, stablecoins, and tokenization. Ripple and BFB additionally plan to drive information initiatives by academic packages and accelerators, whereas actively collaborating in native ecosystem occasions.

As reported by CryptoPotato earlier, Ripple partnered with Immunefi to strengthen the safety of its XRPL Lending Protocol to launch a worldwide “Attackathon” with a $200,000 prize pool. Prime Web3 safety researchers have been invited to establish vulnerabilities forward of the protocol’s validator vote. The initiative additionally affords focused XRPL coaching by the Attackathon Academy.