The worldwide currency exchange provider, Mercury FX has offices all over the world including, Hong Kong, Cape Town and London. The firm has said that the new xRapid payment corridor to the Philippines is now up, running and ready for use. According to Mercury FX’s Twitter, the first payment to use the xRapid system has just been finished on behalf of a consumer from the UK who needed to send across the money in order to pay for his honeymoon! 2/3 The payment was made for an individual client to pay for his honeymoon at the @edgewaterdive Spa Resort in the Philippines. pic.twitter.com/hfKtNgLMTf — Mercury-fx Ltd (@mercury_fx_ltd) March 5, 2019 In January, Mercury FX announced the details of the biggest xRapid commercial payment to date and said that it used xRapid to send a payment of just more than $4,500 from the UK to Mexico. The payment in question was executed in just seconds and when you compare it to the 31 hours it would regularly take on traditional payment rails, this is pretty incredible. Furthermore, the lower fees saved the company a total of $102. The CEO of Mercury FX, Alastair Constance spoke at the Ripple Regionals this year and said that the firm can see xRapid being an effective alternative to SWIFT: “We did our first live commercial payments a couple of weeks ago. So we are now making payments for a UK corporate to Mexico to import Mexican food. And they are moving a lot faster than payments would go through Swift, at a much lower cost… So when you’re looking at high volume payments for companies involved in import/export or remittances or whatever the case may be, when you start to look at the economics of how they stack in favor of a Ripple payment over xRapid, perhaps over Swift, the numbers are actually quite eye-watering.”