Payment participants

To understand Ripple Payments, it’s important to know the participants involved:

Ripple Payments Participants

  • The originator is a customer of an institution who wants to send a payment and who funds the payment through that institution.
  • The sender (or sending institution ) initiates a payment in Ripple Payments through their RippleNet instance. It holds one or more RippleNet accounts from which it can send payments to RippleNet accounts held by other institutions.
  • The intermediaries (or intermediary institutions ) are the RippleNet instances at institutions that facilitate payments from the sender to the receiver.
  • The receiver (or receiving institution ) is a partner institution that is connected to the sender. It has one or more RippleNet accounts into which it can receive payments.
  • The beneficiary is a customer of the receiver who receives the end payment from the receiver.


Note

There are numerous variables in this chain of payment participants. For example, a payment might have no originator or beneficiary, but is simply a payment between RippleNet institutions. And in the case of Internal Treasury transfers, where the payment is a transfer between two accounts owned by a single institution on RippleNet, the sender and receiver are the same entity.