Trump This! A Cheaper Way to Wire Cash to Mexico James Covert - New York Post
go to original April 20, 2016

How to TransferWise (TransferWise)

While Donald Trump threatens to block money transfers to Mexico, one tech startup could spark an increase in the amount of money sent between the two countries by introducing this week a much less expensive way to send cash.

TransferWise — a London-based “unicorn” whose investors include billionaires Richard Branson and Peter Thiel — just launched a US-to-Mexico cash-transfer service that it says is 70 percent cheaper than the competition.

Charging a rate of 1.5 percent on transfers of $200 and up, TransferWise easily beats standard fees of 5 and 6 percent charged by players like Western Union, Moneygram and Xoom, not to mention conventional banks, co-founder Kristo Kaarman said.

“People have a sixth sense that the bank is somehow ripping them off, but they don’t know quite how,” Kaarmann said in an interview this week.

The answer, according to Kaarmann, is that some transfer services are using artificially inflated currency-exchange rates on transactions.

“You have to dig for this information because they don’t publicly disclose the fee,” Kaarmann said of most money-transfer outfits.

As a result, they’ve reaped a bonanza of between $5 billion and $8 billion over the past five years on money transfers between the US and Mexico alone, according to World Bank estimates.

Read the rest at New York Post

Related: Borders Are Meaningless for Digital Currencies (DCE Brief)

Related: Bank Governor Carstens Says Trump Remittance Plan Would Violate Mexican Rights (Reuters)

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