In our online, digital age, many Brokers and MTOs are upgrading their services through new software developments and are even enabling consumers to trade themselves. In the past much of the money transfer and remittance industry was centred around Money Transfer Operators such as Western Union with branches and agents across various high streets and shopping centres the world over.

Transfers such as these could be delivered in cash or picked up from another branch or agent in the beneficiary’s country. Systems were also in place to allow customers to transfer cash to a bank account or move funds from their bank account to bank accounts overseas.

However, the foreign exchange market has become increasingly competitive over recent decades both in terms of exchange rates offered to the customer and how they are able to transfer money. New developments mean that the more traditional MTOs such as Western Union and MoneyGram are upgrading their products to offer more service options and a variety of convenient transfer methods to their customers to combat the ever growing competition.

The nature of this competition implies that customers will now have a myriad of options at their fingertips with regards to transferring their money overseas. Banks, FX Brokers and Currency Specialists are all clamouring to secure business and are offering both increasingly sophisticated and convenient products in the hope of capturing a larger market share.

Much of this growth is occurring across online and mobile platforms that are designed to allow customers to facilitate the transfers in their own time when they are at work, home or even travelling. Furthermore, highly complex FX tools are being made available such as Forward Contracts that allow you to fix a certain exchange rate for a period of time in the future.

Competitive forces helped traditional banking services rapidly evolve into online banking. Soon after appeared stock trading platforms offering customers the ability to manage their investment portfolios. A key revenue generating element businesses started observing is customer empowerment, especially in knowledge-driven economies. Businesses also began realising, especially over the last decade, the “unchartered territory” of the $420 billion remittance industry, which was previously dominated by a handful of MTOs.

Now the race is on amongst various banks across the globe to allow their customers to log on to the banks’ websites to perform remittance transactions themselves instead of having to walk into some MTO branch and wait in those long queues for hours. Now the Telcos are building alliances with banks to empower customers to remit money using their mobile phones. Developments such as these have meant that cost and time have been saved, savings that can then be directly passed on to the customer.

This has left many companies striving to catch up and match the developments laid down by their competitors and thankfully this is where companies such as RemitONE come in. RemitONE are an experienced provider of money transfer software systems to the remittance industry and their solutions are used by banks and MTOs worldwide.

RemitONE’s clients can run their daily operations effectively and efficiently whilst offering their customers the ability to execute transactions from branches, over the Internet, via SMS on mobile phones and by using prepaid card systems.

With a global population that is increasingly using the Internet for their everyday tasks and access to a computer becoming more widely available, the use of technology for money transfers will continue to grow exponentially. The global remittance market alone accounts for over $420 billion annually and with research showing that even in rural parts of the developing world, more people have access to a mobile phone than to a bank account, servicing money transfer corridors with advanced technologies will become increasingly valuable.

Aamer Abedi, Director of Marketing, RemitONE states:

“Our Mobile Remittance Module (MRM) enables organisations to offer their customers the facility to send money via SMS on their mobile phones. We are receiving a rapidly increasing number of inquiries from North America and Africa regarding MRM. Although we are expecting mobile remittance to really gather momentum this year, the success of the rate of adoption of this service will vary from region to region.”

At money transfer comparison website www.sendmoneyhome.org there has been a considerable increase in customers wanting to find out more details about how they can transfer via their mobile phones. This has seen the addition of mobile phone centred remittance providers such as Mukuru.com and Provident Capital Transfers, servicing corridors in Africa and Asia.

However, the development of technology appears to have been split between the favoured remittance corridors of Africa and Asia and the rest of the world. Mobile phone money transfers to the Americas, Australasia and Europe is fairly non-existent and is therefore not taking advantage of the huge markets that they provide. It offers exceptional ease, convenience and value for money and soon every Money Transfer Operator will be clamouring to offer mobile money transfers as one of their services.