Ripple announced on Friday the appointment of Brooks Entwistle as the blockchain company’s Southeast Asian Managing Director. He will oversee growth of the firm’s operations in the region.

Brooks was previously at Uber as its international Chief Business Officer and helped the company in launching services into new markets. Before that, he spent almost two decades at Goldman Sachs in several top management roles with a three-year stint at leading Everstone Group in between.

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“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,” Brooks said in a statement.

RippleNet has expanded aggressively in Asia with several partnerships with banks and financial institutions. Ripple’s dominance in the region was boosted by the addition of BKK Forex within Ripple’s global financial network. Other notable customers of Ripple in the region include Siam Commercial Bank, iRemit and DeeMoney.

Southeast Asian Markets Are Ripe

Ripple’s focus in Southeast Asia is justified by the high adoption of digital payments in the region. The blockchain company claims that the transactions on RippleNet increased by 10 times year-over-year in 2020.

“Southeast Asia’s payments ecosystem is extremely dynamic with fairly complex country-specific schemes which require a lot of in-depth knowledge,” said Asheesh Birla, General Manager of RippleNet. 

“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.”

While Asia looks lucrative for Ripple, the allegations and lawsuit of the US regulator over the sale of the XRP caused a dent in its business. Furthermore, Ripple’s high-profile partner, MoneyGram formally ended ties with the blockchain company over concerns of regulatory backlash.