Ripple has accounced the appointment of former Uber Executive Brooks Entwistle as Managing Director for Southeast Asia to lead and scale operations in their fastest growing region. 

Brooks Entwistle joins Ripple after serving as Uber’s Chief Business Officer, focusing on the firm’s growth throughout Southeast Asia. Previously, the new Ripple Managing Director of Southeast Asia had spent two decades at Goldman Sachs, as partner and chairman in the Asia Pacific region.

“I’m thrilled to join Ripple to scale the company’s footprint in this pivotal region. Having helped build and scale companies across both the financial services and technology industries for the past 30 years, joining an industry leader like Ripple was an obvious choice given the convergence between finance and technology — and even more so in a region that’s at the cusp of accelerating payments innovation. I look forward to leading this talented team as we fuel the future of finance with RippleNet adoption in Southeast Asia and beyond,” said Entwistle. 

General manager of RippleNet, Asheesh Birla, confirmed Entwistle’s appointment and stressed the importance of his extensive experience in the region:

“Southeast Asia’s payments ecosystem is extremely dynamic with fairly complex, country-specific schemes which require a lot of in-depth knowledge. The adoption of RippleNet among the region’s many fintechs, payments service providers and SMEs makes Southeast Asia our biggest market for both customer demand and transaction growth. We’re excited to welcome Brooks to lead the charge as Ripple doubles down on efforts to further our phenomenal growth in the region.”

The ongoing lawsuit filed by the U.S Securities and Exchange Commission has no effect on Ripple’s expansion drift. Not unsurprisingly as Ripple Chief Executive Officer Brad Garlinghouse said previously that their expanstion into the region was ongoing and that its progress would not be affected by the XRP securities case.

RippleNet is Ripple’s proprietary network of financial institutions and payment processors. Transactions on RippleNet already saw a 10x year-on-year increase in 2020 and constitutes a major challenge for Entwistle to beat this the year. In March, one of RippleNet’s high-profile users, MoneyGram, left the payments network, following the uncertainties surrounding XRP thereby ending their partnership.

Entwistles arrival at the company comes at an exciting time for Ripplenet which now includes Singapore-based remittance company BKK Forex, adding to Ripple’s fast growing customer base in the region like—Siam Commercial Bank, iRemit, DeeMoney and others.