Digital money service WorldRemit has partnered with Xpress Money to open new remittance routes across Asia and Africa. Customers of WorldRemit will now be able to make transfers through the Xpress Money network. Countries to be included in the new combined network include Algeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Fiji, Lebanon, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Tonga. Over the coming months, customers in those regions will be able to send and receive money to their bank accounts and mobile wallets.
“Customer convenience ranks high on our list of priorities,” says Sudhesh Giriyan, COO at Xpress Money. “Through this partnership with WorldRemit we are elevating that level of our customers’ convenience as they can now send money at their fingertips, whenever they want, through the WorldRemit app or website.”
WorldRemit Founder and CEO Ismail Ahmed adds that the partnership will help his firm extend its footprint into new territories and enabled “more people to make secure, instant money transfers.”
Ahmed recently spoke at the TechCrunch Disrupt event in London, espousing the view that remittance is ahead of traditional financial systems because it isn’t held back by “archaic” banking infrastructure. The world, he told attendees, underestimates the global importance of remittances due to a large majority of it going through unofficial challenges. Growth is hitting around 7-8% per year on an industry worth an estimated $600 billion. This is being fuelled by migration across Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Mobile money services, because they’re not run by banks, have a completely different set of goals, ambitions and strategies. Telcos understand the needs of their customers and directly target the underbanked and “the bottom of the pyramid”. Two billion people across the world never touch a bank, said Ahmed, and their lives used to revolve around cash – now it revolves around mobile wallets.