By Michael Hovsepian, Development Director at TransferGo
The generalized customer of a money transfer service varies greatly across nationalities and countries. Our global audience is mostly blue-collar. But with Russians, the picture is completely different, because without education and a good income level it is extremely difficult for our compatriots to obtain a long-term residence permit. Therefore, Russians who send money home are mostly white-collar workers who live abroad and financially support their parents who remain in their home country. Of course, we are not talking about illegal migrants, primarily because it is impossible to collect representative statistics on them, and money transfer service requires the user to have a bank account in the country of dispatch. According to our internal data, so far, only 6% of Russians making international money transfers use modern and convenient online services. The rest prefer traditional methods, that is, personally go to a bank or a money transfer company office.
Our service is used by both private clients and small and medium businesses, for which transfer rates are particularly important. Our corporate clients operate in more than 10 different industries, mostly IT. Other popular areas are e-commerce, sales, entertainment and industry.
We launched transfers to Russia less than a year ago – over this time, our clients have transferred more than 4.5 million euros to the Russian Federation. The biggest group of users is Russian immigrants living and working in Germany: they accounted for almost half of all transfers to Russia, closely followed by Lithuania (20% of money transfers to Russian residents are sent from the Baltic states). The average amount of an international transfer is 300 euros. Most often, expats send money to families and friends at home as material support. Small and medium-sized enterprises transfer money to Russia for several reasons: as payments to suppliers, freelance workers, or subsidiaries.
We try to respond to our customers’ needs and are constantly launching new products and services. For example, there is a service for commission-free wire transfers to 47 countries as well as for buying cryptocurrency directly on our platform. These and other innovations should satisfy the most common demands in the modern market and significantly simplify communication between global businesses and their Russian partners.
At present, few people use online transfers; but active lifestyles and desire to save time will lead to services like TransferGo becoming increasingly popular. Any user would want the company responsible for their money flow meet the requirements such as secure and fast transfers with no extra fees. This is where the modern money transfer market is looking right now.