up pace
A mobile phone-based money transfer service targeting
Filipinos residing in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has been
launched as a joint venture by German mobile payments service
provider paybox and Abu Dhabi-based money transfer and payments
company Lari Exchange. The potential market encompasses 300,000
expatriate Filipinos who each year remit $1 billion to the
Philippines, said paybox.
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Charges for the mobile remittance product are expected to be
“significantly lower” than other existing offerings to the
Philippines, it added.
paybox explained that the mobile remittance product is an
interactive voice response service that enables senders to
instantly transfer money to the Philippines using their mobile
phones. To send money, customers have to top up their accounts in
one of the Lari Exchange outlets in the UAE or at any partner
location. They can then remit money to customers of mobile service
provider Globe Telecom in the Philippines. The money is
automatically converted into Philippines pesos and immediately
deposited into the beneficiary’s G-Cash account.
G-Cash, a mobile phone payments service operated by Globe Telecom,
enables person-to-person payments, bill payments and cash
withdrawals at G-Cash partner outlets, which include banks and
merchants.
The paybox/Lari Exchange service represented the opening of the
first mobile payments channel for expatriates in the UAE and would
be followed by the launch of similar services for other
nationalities in the UAE, said paybox’s senior vice-president
operations and delivery, Robert Abel.
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By GlobalDataIndicative of a growing interest in the Gulf region’s remittance
market, the paybox/Lari Exchange service follows close on the heels
of the launch of a remittance service for expatriates in the UAE by
UAE-based Emirates Bank and US financial technology developer
InfoSpan in August this year.
The two new services are also set to be joined soon by another
competitor, Etisalat, the UAE’s telecommunications service
provider. Etisalat has announced that it has entered into an
agreement with Philippines mobile phone service provider Smart
Communications (SC) to jointly develop and launch an international
money transfer service using mobile phones.
The new service will be based on SC’s Smart Money electronic
financial services platform, an electronic wallet card linked to a
mobile phone. Essa Al Haddad, Etisalat’s chief marketing officer,
said the remittance service would initially be offered in the UAE,
which plays host to nearly 200 different nationalities, and be
later extended to other Etisalat service areas such as Egypt, Saudi
Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and West Africa.
