Remitly, backed by Jeff Bezos has started providing payments services to India. Now, with Remitly it has become easy to send money from the US to India in mere span of minutes. With the start of the Remitly services in India, it has instantly lit over $11 billion market with aggressive evaluation and Forex rates. During the year 2012, Remitly started its initial operations with the Philippines market. Remitly is pioneer to introduce a mobile based platform for direct payments.
Remitly is backed by some heavy weight investors like Tomorrow Ventures, Triad Partnership, QED Investors and Founders’ Co-Op, apart from Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. Currently this venture remits nearly $100 million per year. Remitly is authorized to send money across 41 states in just few clicks, which ensure that people do not have to get harassed with the forms nor they have to get pay hefty fees to the middle men for the transaction.
If you go by the current Forex rates, Remitly is offering Rs. 61.56 for every dollar, which will take three days to get delivered. But this rate is only offered to basic delivery. For the express delivery, Remitly offers Rs.61.35, which takes hardly few hours to get transferred. For transactions below $1000, there is a minimal charge of $1.99, but for transactions above $1000, there is no such charge applicable. Remitly is providing better rates than any other remittance providers for US to India. However, it is very imperative to mention here that most of the government banks are providing better rates than the private ones. Among the private sectors, some of the major players in this entire remittance market are Kotak Mahindra, ICICI, HDFC, Axis Bank, Remit2India, Citi Bank to name a few.
Since the beginning of the Remitly services in India, in this short span of time Remitly has already partnered over 120 banks in the country to make the money transfer instant and fast. Along with the fast money transfer services, Remitly has also introduced a unique ‘delivery guarantee’ which ensure that the delivery charges (if below $1000) and the money to be transferred will be reverted back to the sender’s account in case of any delay in transferring the amount. There are many provisions under Instant Direct Deposit NRIs can instantly transfer money from USA to India within 24 hours.
India is one of the leading countries that receive a huge quantity of payment from the foreign countries. A survey report says that till 2013, India received about $70 billion remittances from across the globe and it is all sent by the Non-Resident Indians, which is almost 4% of the country’s GDP. Money transfer from USA to India is counted among the best payment corridors globally. India remittance is about the increase the coming years even more, with more and more people choosing to go abroad.
The remittance market is at its high pace at the present times, therefore better services and the best rates are guaranteed.
Hi Vidhyaa, thank you for the article – companies like Remitly are a welcoming addition for remittance consumers in USA.
Remittance corridors like USA-India have already been extraordinarily competitive lately while customers tend to stick with their choices. Hence, would be interesting to see if Remitly could gain a noticeable market share in the next few years without outspending incumbents on acquisition and retention.
For example, several large money transmitters are already charging less than 1% for FX markup while Remitly tends to be on a high end. As of this moment, the rate on their website is 61.58INR for 1 $USD while Western Union, MoneyGram, Ria are in 61.7-62.1 range. The fees are also declining – several providers charge less than $5 for sending $0-3K from a bank account.
We built a simple tool comparing margins across providers for USA-India – take a look at how low those are at: https://www.saveonsend.com/