Money Transfer Currency News
Send Money Home
Here’s another company that’s showing up under a search for online money transfer.
It’s SendMoneyHome.com which says the following on its site;
If you are living or working overseas or making a foreign purchase, finding the best way to transfer your foreign currency abroad can be a time consuming and costly exercise.
Send Money Home provides visitors with an independent comparison of the services offered by money transfer providers, banks and prepaid money cards for sending money abroad – including fees, exchange rates, speed and method of transfer.
They do have a useful content section however the website is a little confusing and hard to understand exactly what their key selling point is.
Obopay Mobile Money Services
Press Release from Obopay launching a first-of-its-king mobile money service, powered by Nokia and Obopay. The system uses a mobile payments platform to facilitate Customer Convenience and encourage Financial Inclusion.
MUMBAI – Feb. 15, 2010 – Nokia, a global leader in the mobile telecommunications industry, YES BANK, India’s new-age private sector Bank and Obopay India, a wholly owned subsidiary of Obopay, Inc., have launched a Mobile Payment Service which establishes a platform enabling transfer of money using the mobile device in a secure manner. YES BANK, one of the pioneer banks in the Mobile Payments space, has received the regulatory approvals from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), India’s Central Bank to act as the Issuing bank and the custodian of funds under these services. This innovative pre-paid mobile payments service will be initiated as a pilot in Pune, one of the largest metropolitan cities in India. These services will be widely distributed leveraging off the reach of Nokia’s retail channel.
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Western Union Localized Domains
It’s interesting how a company like Western Union is dealing with overseas visitors.
When visiting the Western Union domain (westernunion.com) from a location outside of the US the visitor is redirected to a localized domain name (for instance westernunion.com.au) instead of the US .com website.
This happens quite regularly in other businesses however WU don’t allow the choice to go back to the US facing website, they only allow the visitor to see their local version of the site without any other International options.
Generally if you’re from another location and are travelling this would be a particularly annoying experience as you’re not going to see the version of the website that you’re used to, you’d only be able to see the money transfer services they have available for the country that you’re visiting their site from at the moment.
Hopefully they update this at some point and allow non-US visitors to get to westernunion.com as well.
Converting Money Online
When you’re looking to convert money online, there’s a good chance you’re either searching for ways to convert money from one currency to another between different bank accounts or you’re generally just looking for a currency converter online.
Whichever it is that you’re trying to achieve, there are reasonably simple options available.
For your first option where you actually have some money in an account somewhere and you’d like it to be converted to another currency in another account somewhere else in the world, you might want to use a service like Currency Online. A company like this has been set up specifically to help you achieve this task, that’s their main focus and they do it well.
If you’re only after the second option, trying to find out what converting money online would cost you and how much money you would end up with if you did do it then there are many different conversion tools available including the above currency conversion tool as well as others from people like MoneyGram, Western Union and many more.
Whichever option you’re looking for, just remember that there are different quote rates based on whether or not you’re converting money online between countries or just within your own country as well as many other factors that can change the conversion rate.
Moneygram Questions
After having a further look around for more information to add to our Moneygram Review it seems there are quite a few situations where people have asked if the Moneygram order they have completed is legitimate or not.
Here are some examples;
I have received two Money Gram Money Orders the first in the amount of $500.00 with a routing number of 091900533 & indicating payable thru Wells Fargo Bank, South Central, N.A. Anchorage, Alaska and could have been purchased at Raley’s Bel Air Nob Hill Food Source. It also shows Issue/Drawer, Money Gram Payment Systems, Inc.
The other Money Gram Money Order is in the amount of $300.00 and shows the same routing number and both were purchased on 8/25/2009, from BlurtIt.
The answer that came back was;
I got three from scammers. This is an old trick. They use Craigslist to buy things with fake Money Orders and then ask for the “overpayment” to be wired back to them. Since it takes weeks for your bank to find out the check is phony, the crook (based in Africa) has your real $$$ which you wired to him.
So, the questions appear to be legitimate issues, be careful that you know where the money is coming from and that you know exactly what it is for before handing over any detailed information.
Money Transfer you can Trust
One of the difficult things with finding the right money transfer service online is making sure it’s one that you can trust will give you good service and help you out if something goes wrong.
If you take a service like Currency Online, they are working hard let people know that there are real people with quality teams trading money behind the scenes, all working hard to make sure you can trust their money transfer service along with working to bring you the best possible client service that they can for an online business.
MoneyGram Review
I’ve been having a look around different specific review websites and am surprised by the amount of people who are writing bad reviews for the MoneyGram Money Transfer Service.
The reviews for MoneyGram have ranged from some saying they have received the “worst” service from this company that they have ever received from any company online to others who have said that MoneyGram were trying to overcharge them for a speedy money delivery when it never happened.
There were a couple that were positive e.g. one said “I am satisfied with their service.” and I guess it’s pretty easy to take a shot at a company online when you’ve just had a bit of bad customer service so I’ll continue doing some research into what the real reviews about MoneyGram are saying.
Money Transfer with Xoom
I just came across a video from the CEO of Xoom, John Kunze.
In the video, John talks a lot about Xoom.com being the safe way to send money online. He uses a piece of paper with someone’s personal details on it to represent how they encrypt personal information.
It’s a nicely done piece of marketing covering what is probably the largest barrier to transferring money online being the worry about identity theft and personal information theft from the organisation that’s transferring the money.
Here’s the video if you want to watch it for yourself;
History of iKobo
Having just done some research on iKobo it is pretty easy to find a fair bit online about when the company went through a difficult period in November 2008 and was temporarily shut down, then bought out and re-opened by M2-Group.
There are a large number of comments, quite a few of them very positive about the iKobo service available for example this one on the TechCrunch article about the original iKobo shutdown;
Put me down for No Complaints about Ikobo. I used them for 4 different recipients in 3 different countries, for almost 3 years. Thousands of dollars transferred, instantly; never a mischarge, never a hassle delivering the original or replacement debit cards, and professional customer service that did what I needed of them quickly after verifying my identity.
Bank Charges on TT Payments
Banks have a particularly bad habit of making telegraphic transfer (TT) payments very difficut and far too expensive.
This regular over charging coming from what was once a close to monopoly situation (particularly in smaller countries) is one of the main reasons that the online money transfer market exists at all.
Recently the business I look after received funds from an off-shore account where the advertiser was booking a small amount of online advertising and were paying the in invoice through telegraphic transfer. The payment received was $25 short on the expected amount so we assumed the client had done the wrong thing and ticked a box saying that the money transfer charges should be paid out of our account not theirs.