Why People Switch Money Transfer Providers

How do we explain the money transfer decisions of our customers?

To help answer this question we recently asked tens of thousands of people globally (yes, tens of thousands from Brazil to Germany, and we’re still asking more) about their money transfer habits. Here's a little snippet... While price is often assumed to be the most important factor in choosing a money transfer provider, our analysis shows how different international markets are. Business plans for one country cannot simply be rolled out to others.

UK Customers Value Price

It's unsurprising to see the U.K.'s market is the most competitive of some of our initial countries surveyed. As a global fintech hub, the U.K. transfer market is highly competitive and mature. We see national advertising campaigns encouraging customers to look beyond banks and traditional providers and the average U.K. customer is bombarded with messaging focusing on price.

Conversely, of those transferring money internationally from the United States, less than half cite price as the most important factor in their choice of a money transfer provider.

If you want to win a US customer, you are going to have to work harder. If you really want to dig into the details with us and get into the richness of our datasets (like the massive data collection above) - get in touch with me.

Looking back, Moneygram has struggled to recover from its major losses after the financial crisis of 2008 and has never regained the value it had ten years ago. Western Union has hung in there against immense competition and whilst currently 15% below its value of 10 years ago, has rarely moved too much outside of this value band.

Euronet is the outlier. With its base of Ria (remittances) and payment processing it has since become a formidable player in the money transfer space (acquiring HiFX and XE along the way). Should they win the bid for Moneygram, the combined group would be worth more than half of Western Union’s current $9.3bn and would be Western Union’s single biggest competitor.

But that story won’t play out if Ant Financial (formerly known as Alipay and worth about $60 bn) has anything to do with it. So keen is Ant to gain a foothold into the US remittances market it recently sent a letter to Moneygram users promising their money and data will secure in response to a massive political backlash of potential Chinese ownership. As this battle plays out - we’ll be here for you, watching and analyzing. Stay tuned.