Understanding Ripple, XRP, and the global money transfer ecosystem.

Below is my attempt to quantify the market that Ripple is going after and what it means to XRP and its value . There is a lot of large math but bear with me because all of these numbers point to where Ripple and XRP are currently and where they could be.

The Marketplace in Numbers

In 2017 approximately $1.425 quadrillion was transferred globally using SWIFT. Here the math:

1. SWIFT messages sent per day in 2017(assuming 200 business days): $35,500,000.00 (REF:A)
2. Daily $ transferred: $7,128,804,434,230.90 (calculated by taking 2005 daily transfer value (REF:B) and assuming 3%(which is low) growth year over year)
3. Value of average SWIFT transfer: $200,811.39 (SWIFT Messages/Daily $ transferred)
4. $ Transferred in 2017: $1,425,760,886,846,180.00

In comparison to SWIFT, Fedwire (Federal Reserve Wire Transfer service for US banks) moved $766,961,537,000,000.00 in 2016 (REF:C) and the whole remittance industry’s (Wester Union, MoneyGram, etc) only transferred approximately $595,694,726,962.88 (REF:D) and Fedwire moved . Obviously the word “only” is relative here as that number is still quite impressive.
When add SWIFT, Fedwire, and the remittance industry together those groups are moving over $2.1 quadrillion each year… that’s 107x USA’s national debt., at the time of writing.
Ripple’s Game Plan (as I understand it.)
Ripple is after that 2 quadrillion dollar market but they have only just taken a few baby steps so far. In terms of international wire transfers, Ripple wants to first get banks to adapt xCurrent which is the blockchain version of SWIFT with some major upgrades and is estimated to be about 40% of the cost of SWIFT.
Once xCurrent is adapted then they will try and convince banks to use XRP as a source of liquidity which should save an additional 10%, making xCurrent about 70% cheaper than SWIFT. 60-70% savings is no laughing matter considering that average SWIFT transfer costs $63(REF:E), which extends to $447,300,000,000.00 per year. The implantation of xCurrent would save consumers and banks $268,380,000,000.00 each year without the implementation of XRP and $313,110,000,000.00 with it.
Ripple also has two other “solutions” as they call it. xRapid which is a low-cost liquidity solution, basically what they would, hopefully, convince banks to use after the adaption of xCurrent. Currently, xRapid is being beta tested by some remittance companies (moneygram, etc), but again that is a small portion of the overall global money transfer ecosystem.
The other solution is xVia which is for,”… corporates, payment providers and banks who want to send payments across various networks using a standard interface.” I imagine the target audience of this solution would be Amazon or Alibaba, basically large multinational corporations who are doing business in all corners of the globe and are interested in reducing their costs and improving the bottom line. I haven’t looked into how large of a market this is as it is tough to quantify the potential of global markets, specifically emerging markets. Also, this solution is not operational yet.
Why it matters?

1. It shows the ambition of the ripple team. They are in the select group of crypto companies/currencies that are attempting to address a real world problem, worth quadrillions of dollars.
2. It’s a quadrillion dollar market that is growing and will continue to grow with the global economy. If Ripple was to capture just a quarter of this market ($2,741,647,648,216.43) and managed to implement XRP in said market. A single XRP token would have to be worth, at minimum, $27.42 ($2,741,647,648,216.43/99,992,618,103.26(REF:E)=27.42). This figure does not account for transaction costs (the destruction of XRPs), the potential impacts of xVia, or the growth of the global economy.
3. This math also shows how much farther Ripple and XRP have to go before they are real contender in the global money transfer ecosystem.
   Summary
   Ripple is after a huge marketplace. The success of Ripple will not necessarily result in an increase in value for the XRP token, especially if it is not adapted. If Ripple is successful both in convincing banks to use their software solutions and XRP a source of liquidity the value of XRP could increase 2,700-10,000% but there is no timeline for this as there are too many unknowns. Simply put Ripple are just pups nipping at the heels of giants. Only time will tell if they level the playing field or the playing field levels them.
   References:
   A: https://www.swift.com/news-events/news/exceeding-7-billion-message-mark_just-one-of-the-highlights-of-a-successful-2017-at-swift
   B: https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/shared/Appendix_D.pdf
   C: https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fedfunds_ann.htm
   D: http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/migrationremittancesdiasporaissues/brief/migration-remittances-data
   E: https://www.mybanktracker.com/news/wire-transfer-fee-comparison-top-10-us-banks
   F: https://xrpcharts.ripple.com/#/