The money transfer market or the remittance market is large,
with various avenues to explore. The market has been growing at a standard
speed over the last two decades, driven mostly by a combination of long-term
trends relating to immigration flows, disparities among national economies and
technological innovation.
There have been many changes in the way consumers have been
using money transfer services. The market is not the same as it was 5-7 years
ago. ATM machines, Kiosks, Internet Portals have initiated an ever increasing
wave in the money remittance sector. These developments can be considered as
the blessing of the growth in technology and internet. More and more people are
now switching allegiance to these new age techniques & leaving the phase of
traditional techniques behind. These trends offer a huge potential for various
MTOs (Money Transfer Organizations) to create and implement various ideas on
different platforms. They are also looking to explore avenues to promote their
services via complementary products. This can help in putting a proper work
guideline in place along with increasing revenue and secure customer loyalty.
Many financial pundits predict that the dropping transfer
fees and ever changing foreign exchange rates will put the businesses of money
transfer services providers under a blanket of low profitability. These profits
may seem low on daily profits but it will show huge developments in terms of
long term profits. In the coming days, agreements will vanish out with
regulations becoming more rigorous. This will leave the brick-and-mortar
businesses in a lurch in regards to compare with online businesses. The
majority of customers are still relying on face-to-face transactions for money
transfer and their adoption of these alternative channels has been slow. If
providers were able to push consumers towards automation of money transfer
transactions, they would be able to achieve much greater customer throughput,
which becomes essential at peak times (such as pay day). Self-service kiosks
are an important tool for achieving this end.
The most early and pivotal breakthrough in online money
transfer services was brought by private non-banking players, i.e. PayPal,
Western Union, Epay, etc. These players defined an innovative and an unexplored
way of transferring money online through emails. All users need is to create an
account and fund the account using credit card. The money can then be used to
make payments, transfer to any bank, any country, and any account instantly.
What makes it even better is transaction charges levied by these non-banking
organizations, which is so economic that everyone can afford
