In 2015, the World Bank expects $608 billion to be sent back home by migrant workers around the world through money transfers known as “remittances”.
Three-quarters of this sum will flow towards developing countries to pay for food, education, health care or starting businesses. Some insurance services will provide Inter Care globally.
Remittances can contribute to better health by enabling household members to purchase more food and access better health care services. Remittances have also been shown to provide greater access to health care. Especially, in 56 developing countries, higher remittances per capita. Remittances are often a crucial source of income, ensuring the survival of many poor households. Remittances allow households to better withstand unexpected losses of income or threats to livelihood such as drought, famine, or other natural disasters. Remittances are often used to make improvements to property, allowing for more sturdy construction.
The size of this market and the fact that it is still dominated by ancient monoliths and payment behaviors make it ripe for disruption and has attracted many new providers. The extraordinary amounts of venture capital (VC) being poured into the money transfer industry, over $140m in the first two months of 2015 alone, are enabling new technologies and business models to take over.
TransferWise, which offers the true mid-market exchange rate thanks to a “peer-to-peer” payment system, announced in late January that it had secured $58m from American VC firm Andreessen Horowitz. After raising a record $40m last year in a Series A round from VC firm Accel Partners, WorldRemit just announced a $100m funding round to fuel its global expansion. Xoom, a digital remittance service provider founded in 2001, is now publicly traded and valued at over $600m. New player, Remitly just raised $12.5M in Series B in March to help immigrants send money to family and friends abroad. Remitly is a mobile payments service that enables consumers to conveniently make person-to-person international money transfers from the U.S.
Other great examples include Azimo, TransferGo, PayWay, CurrencyFair and Remit.vn. These companies are part of a new wave of money transfer operators around the world, operating entirely online and with a more transparent and fair pricing of remittance services.
“A characteristic of the global remittances trade is the prominence of informal as well as formal funds-transfer methods and instruments” Nguyen said. Formality and informality are, of course, relative concepts in many developing countries as in Vietnam, typically, banks and post, and so on dominate formal transfers. Now, the trend is changing, there are a number of ways, depending on the circumstances. Pay Way is a hub to Vietnam with plenty methods as Deposit Bank Account, Cash Pick – up, Direct to Cards, Mobile Wallets, Home Delivery, etc. Nguyen shared.
The SEA region has high remittance flow, the SEA region has large inbound remittance, which constituted $56.8 billion or almost % of the total SEA remittance of $ billion in 2014. Two countries with largest remittance flow in SEA, namely the Philippines and Vietnam collectively contributed to more than half of the region's total remittance. In terms of inter-region remittance outflow from SEA, the 3 largest remittance recipients are from Asia Pacific, while most of the inflow came from North America and the Middle Eastern countries. China and India are the largest recipients of inter-region remittance from the SEA region, as migrants from these two countries fill up domestic jobs in the SEA region. Meanwhile, US is the largest source country for remittance into the SEA region due to a large population of Filipinos and Vietnamese in the country. Vietnam is forecast to receive between $13 billion and $14 billion in overseas remittances this year, up from $12 billion in 2014, the central bank. Remittances from Vietnamese overseas remains a key part of the country's economy, equivalent to about 8 percent of gross domestic product. More than half of the capital comes from the United States. With appointed remittance, many players allow the sender to pay for specific goods and services such as a mobile phone bill or medication, retaining control over how their money is spent and giving more emotional meaning to the transfer than when sending cold hard cash.
While over 2.5 billion people around the world lack access to a bank account, 1 billion of them own a mobile phone which can serve as a gateway to financial services to invest in and protect their livelihoods. This has convinced prominent figures of the promise of mobile money solutions for the financial inclusion of the world’s poorest, as by partnering with mobile wallet providers such as MoMo, VTC, Viettel, Ngan Luong, … , money transfer operators such as Pay Way is enabling their customers to send money to millions of mobile wallets in Vietnam instantly.
Finally, Visa card, Master card, Bitcoin and other virtual currencies are starting to show their potential as worthy methods to send money. Visa card and Master card that aim to offer extra money move as remittance by settle with local banks as debit cards. While, Bitcoin isn’t without its flaws, and the system isn’t sufficiently mature for recipients in developing countries to enter and remain in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Simply put, too few merchants accept bitcoins as a means of payment. Recognizing this, Filipino startup Satoshi Citadel Industries launched Rebit.ph, a service allowing migrants to send bitcoins to the Philippines. The recipient receives Philippine pesos on their bank account, in cash, as airtime credit or to pay for bills, without ever knowing that the transaction involved a virtual currency. BitPesa, which recently raised $1.1m, offers a similar service for remittances from the UK to Kenya, disbursing Kenyan Shillings on mobile wallets such as M-Pesa or Orange Money.
The entrance of these numerous new actors in the remittance market will undoubtedly drive down fees and provide migrants with cheaper, faster and more convenient services as well as an overall better customer experience. The enormous sums being poured into the industry and the ensuing growth in the adoption of new solutions will certainly make 2015 a landmark year for remittances, with more exciting developments yet to come.
However, the large number of remittance options also entails more complexity for migrants when deciding which service to use, which can confuse and overwhelm them. For this reason, we built www.remit.vn , a hub for money transfer services. Pay Way enables Vietnamese Oversea to easily find the services best suited to their needs, stop wasting their hard-earned money on excessive money transfer fees and they can make their money move smartly.
Tham khảo thêm tại: remit.vn
