Global finance may be heading toward a shift in cross-border settlements. Speaking at the XRP APEX 2025 event in Singapore, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse shared a bold projection: XRP could capture 14% of SWIFT's volume over the next five years, driven by a focus on liquidity rather than messaging infrastructure.

Leveraging Crypto-Based Liquidity

Garlinghouse’s comments reflect a broader ambition within Ripple to challenge traditional financial rails by leveraging crypto-based liquidity solutions.

While SWIFT currently dominates the interbank messaging landscape for cross-border payments, Garlinghouse argued that the true battleground lies in liquidity, the ability to move money, not just send instructions.

“There are two parts to SWIFT today: messaging and liquidity,” Garlinghouse said. “Liquidity is owned by the banks. I think less about the messaging and more about liquidity. If you're driving all the liquidity, it is good for XRP… so I’ll say five years, 14%.”

At the same event, Ripple’s Chief Legal Officer also highlighted the potential for rapid growth in the tokenized asset sector. “Hundreds of billions of tokenized global assets [will emerge] fairly quickly,” he said, signaling Ripple’s intent to position XRP as a foundational layer in that transformation.

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The vision presented at APEX 2025 hints at a future in which traditional financial infrastructure coexists, or competes, with blockchain-powered systems.

Cross-Border Finance

By targeting liquidity, Ripple aims to plug into the critical layer of cross-border finance that determines how quickly and cheaply value can move across borders. At the time of this publication, XRP traded for $2.31, after a 3% and 1% increase in the past week and day, respectively. Ranked #4 on CoinMarketCap, the token has a market capitalization of $136 billion.

While such projections are ambitious, they reflect growing momentum in the digital asset space, where major institutions are increasingly exploring blockchain-based alternatives to legacy financial systems.

Read more: Is XRP Moving Up Ahead of a Possible Ripple-SWIFT Integration?

In April, rumors about a collaboration between Ripple and SWIFT emerged. Garlinghouse reportedly suggested the possibility of either an integration or a replacement. A former SWIFT employee also claimed that banks have tested XRP’s compatibility with the SWIFT network.

Source: Finance Magnates