Online Money Transfer
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;
Currency exchange in airports after customs
I’m in an airport at the moment waiting for a flight to open for check-in. It’s interesting that from here I can see into the after customs area of the airport and there is a currency exchange booth in there.
After customs currency exhange would probably be the most expensive option that I can think of for exchanging money into a different currency.
Foreign ATM charges
ATM charges from foreign countries can be a lot larger than you might expect and there’s not usually any advanced warning on how much the ATM charge is going to be.
I just withdrew $100 AUD from an ATM in Brisbane as I needed cash and only had my cards on me. I knew it would cost me a fee for using the ATM to withdraw foreign cash but after checking my account online today I was shocked to see that I had been charged $11 just to make the withdraw!
That’s daylight robbery.
If the ATM had a sign on it saying that any foreign currency ATM charges would amount to 11% of the currency withdrawn I don’t think a single tourist would use it.
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.
Currency exchange rates on flights
I’m writing this on a plane flight ( it’s ok, flight mode is on ) after hearing the flight crew offer currency exchange rates on the plane during the flight for purchase of items directly from their in-flight shop.
The currency exchange rates are horrendous!
The best advice I can offer here is to make sure you have local currency in cash before you board any flight from any country as the airline will always charge you a lot more than the standard currency exchange rate on a plane.
Searching for money transfer sites
As I started doing some research today on what the top performing money transfer sites are I started in the most logical place by doing a search on Google for “money transfer”. For some reason the search I did used the Australian version of Google (haven’t figured out why yet) but the results that I received were quite odd.
The first two results on the page were Money Gram Australia (the domain was a .com.au) and then Money Gram for the US (it was the .com version of the Money Gram site).
Now I would have thought this makes it hard for the user of Google to believe there are any other sites that are strongly competing for money transfer site services as Google is saying that the best result is Money Gram no matter what?
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Currency Exchange Options
Currency exchange options were originally limited to going down to your physical bank (or to the bank branch at an airport) however over time, the options consumers have been given have drastically increased.
Following banks, more and more dedicated exchange companies like Travelex were formed as there was an acknowledged growing market and a reasonable commission could be charged for the exchange.
Eventually even travel agencies would allow currency exchange options to their clients to help them get the currency they were planning on travelling with.
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Money Transfer Scam – BBC Video
This is an interesting BBC interview where a woman was scammed into using Western Union and Money Gram to transfer into someone elses account. While the money transfer systems are safe when treated with care, people need to remember that their account information is as important as their bank account login and passwords and should be kept very secure.
So, the moral of the story is never give out your information to a third party. There are plenty of ways to get the money to another person without ever giving them your account details.
Money Transfer Research
From our own experience, we know that transferring money online can be a daunting task when you’re starting from scratch and have no idea how you’re going to complete the transfer.
Here we’ll try and show some of the options that are available for transfer both between different accounts online and between different exchange rates if your money is in different currencies.
After a reasonably cursory look around online there are the old brand names that people recognize and trust like Western Union and Money Gram in certain countries however there are also a new breed of online transfer companies like PayPal, CurrencyOnline, Xoom and iKobo that are turning up.
Can you trust the new companies? Do you know enough about them? Are any of them local?