Four Reasons To Ditch Traditional Money Transfer Methods
Aditi Patel
Top Money Transfer Editor
Here are the four main reasons why you’d want to stop ending money internationally using traditional methods such as banks and remittance companies:
1. High Fees
Sending money overseas with a bank or traditional remittance service like Western Union can cost you anywhere from a minimum of $10 to an average of $50 each time. That’s outrageous! Why should you share your hard-earned salary with those hefty bankers? Instead, save it for your loved ones back home. There has to be a solution to this outdated monopoly system.
2. Delayed processing with no assurance.
Remittance companies may advertise lower fees, typically around $5 per transfer, but they frequently impose hidden charges through unfair currency exchange rates. This could lead to additional losses of $5 or even more. Moreover, these services are often notoriously sluggish, sometimes taking weeks to finalize a transaction.
Consider waiting for weeks, only to receive a message that your transfer wasn’t delivered. Do you or your family have that kind of time to wait for money? What if there’s an emergency, like medical bills or school fees? Money transfers need to be prompt and dependable.
3. Unjust currency exchange rates in the process of transferring money.
Your money could melt away like ice cream in your hand due to rate issues. When sending money back home, banks, or remittance companies often charge disproportionately high fees with unfair local currency exchange rates. This could mean losing up to 16% in addition to the transfer fee.
But why does changing money to local currency, which doesn’t require much labor or investment in manufacturing lines, come with such high costs? What’s the reason behind these excessively high rate differences?
4. Tedious documentation for money transfers
In many countries, sending or receiving money from abroad requires extensive documentation and permissions. In urgent situations where you need extra money from your family, banks and governments may demand numerous pages of documents. Why should honest people like us have to endure this just to receive money from our own family?