With WorldRemit, send money online 24/7 to 140 destinations at highly competitive exchange rates. Send to bank accounts and mobile money wallets, top up a loved one's mobile phone or send for cash pick-up.
BER Research Like a number of other online remittance companies, World Remit offers a discounted way to send money to more than 140 countries throughout the world.
With WorldRemit, funds can be sent to bank accounts, mobile money wallets, can be picked up as cash at partnering banks and can be used to top up a loved one’s mobile phone.
WorldRemit is an online service with no physical outlets, which allows for lower costs and greater convenience; it’s also the first of the new wave of FX companies to offer instant WhatsApp notifications on the status of transfers.
WorldRemit isn’t a viable choice for large payments, such as property purchases, because its maximum transfer sizes are quite limited in many countries.
WorldRemit money transfers are far more cost-effective than bank transfers but aren’t quite as cheap as the industry’s lowest-cost services.
Together with a competitive exchange rate, WorldRemit levies a small transfer fee that varies by currency (AUD 3.99, USD 3.99, GBP 0.99 etc.).
When both rates and fees are considered, the cost of sending, for example, AU$2,000 to the US equates to 1.4 percent of the transferred amount, or roughly AU$28. The same is true for the same amount sent to Europe, India and many other countries. This compares with costs worth 4–7 percent with the banks.
When compared with other foreign exchange specialists on these same currency routes, WorldRemit is slightly more expensive. The industry’s cheapest providers have fees and exchange rates that push total costs down into the 0.4–0.7 percent range.
Importantly, WorldRemit guarantees the exchange rate seen on screen at the time you create your transfer order, which means your recipient knows how much they’ll receive.
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WorldRemit customers can top up a loved one’s mobile phone in more than 70 countries, most of these in Africa, Asia or the Americas.
Phone airtime (or “credit”) can be used to make calls, send texts and/or buy mobile data from the telco provider. Airtime top-ups sent with WorldRemit are usually received instantly by the recipient but can take a few minutes.
When creating an airtime transfer, you’ll be asked to enter the recipient’s phone number so do ensure this is correct because there is no way to cancel or reclaim money sent to the wrong phone.
Be aware that some national governments have chosen to apply a tax to incoming airtime top-ups, which means that recipients in those countries receive slightly less in phone credit than the amount sent, but this is beyond WorldRemit’s control and if your destination country does apply taxes you’ll be informed before completing your transfer.
WorldRemit allows customers to transfer money to mobile money accounts like M-Pesa, Tigo and MTN Mobile Money, among others. With these electronic money services, funds are linked to a mobile phone number and users can receive and store money, and pay bills using a basic mobile phone (a smartphone isn’t needed). Mobile money is particularly popular in developing countries where there are still great numbers of “unbanked.”
Like airtime top-ups, WorldRemit transfers to mobile money accounts are instant, or near-instant.
WorldRemit’s cash pick-up service is available in more than 70 countries, although most of these are in developing parts of the world. Cash pick-ups are not available in advanced European countries, Australia or the US.
As with Mobile Money, cash pick-ups are a great way to get money to loved ones who do not possess bank accounts. As long as recipients can show a valid photo ID and provide the transaction reference number, they’ll be able to collect your funds in cash from a local WorldRemit partner, usually a bank.
BER has been made aware of a few cases where cash pick-ups at local banks have been denied by branch staff — staff who say they have no knowledge of WorldRemit. This has occurred even after confirmation of the transfer and pick-up location has been received within the WorldRemit app. Whether due to a communication problem between WorldRemit and its agents or due to inadequate staff training on the agent side, this really is unforgivable. Fortunately, these cases are extremely rare.
Funding options are excellent with WorldRemit: pay with a bank transfer, with Visa or Mastercard debit and credit cards, with ApplePay and Google Pay, and in several countries you can pay with established online payment services, such as SOFORT (Germany, Austria, Belgium, UK), POLi (New Zealand and Australia) and iDeal (Netherlands), among others.
Beware “cash transfer” fees applied by some credit card companies. No portion of these fees goes to WorldRemit.
Instructions for each payment method are provided online and within the app at the time you create your transfer order.
WorldRemit has no minimum transaction size; however, the maximum amounts that can be sent are definitely lower than with many other firms, which is a big negative for those who need to move large amounts.
With WorldRemit, the maximum amount you can send depends on the sending country (and in some cases also the receiving country) and the method of payment.
To give you an idea, a WorldRemit customer in New Zealand paying for a transfer with a credit card or ApplePay could send NZD 4,000 in one go, and NZD 8,000 within any 24-hour period. If funding the transfer using POLi, the same customer could send NZD 8,000 in one go but still only NZD 8,000 every 24 hours.
In France, the 24-hour limit is only EUR 8,000; in Singapore, it’s only SGD 10,000, and in Switzerland, only CHF 12,000.
From some countries you can send much more (for example, AUD 50,000, GBP 50,000), and from some countries, less, but in all cases the maximums are considered low by industry standards.
Within WorldRemit’s Getting Started information (available on its FAQ page), you can find further max-transfer details for your country and payment method.
WorldRemit is well-capitalized, highly regulated and has the right technology in place to secure your account, so “yes,” we believe that money sent with WorldRemit is perfectly safe.
As a British company, WorldRemit is regulated by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and as such is required to separate customer funds from its own and hold these in a tier-1 financial institution. Because it sends money internationally, WorldRemit must also satisfy a number of other global regulatory bodies, and this it does.
All WorldRemit communications are secured with 256-bit SSL encryption and in an effort to detect fraudulent account use, WorldRemit has teams and systems in place that continually monitor customer accounts for signs of unusual activity.
Phone support options with WorldRemit are probably the best in the industry, with more than 25 phones lines offered in 22 countries.
Canadians will appreciate both French and English-language phone support and Filipinos can call toll-free on PLDT, SUN and SMART networks. In the UK, WorldRemit offers a separate support line for businesses.
Online queries can also be sent via the company’s Contact Us page.
When problems occur, the overwhelming majority of users provide positive feedback on WorldRemit’s customer support staff; however, users shouldn’t expect staff to have the same level of foreign exchange knowledge as those at WorldFirst or OFX — companies that we feel offer an enhanced payments experience.
Online reviews suggest that the overwhelming majority (>90 percent) of WorldRemit money transfers are handled smoothly and quickly.
BER research indicates that customer complaints have picked up but the number of complaints is still very low relative to total reviews, and after reading a number of negative reviews, we feel that some of these troublesome transfers were held up by factors that WorldRemit could not have controlled.
There have been some worrying issues with cash pick-ups (see above) but all in all, WorldRemit feedback has been excellent. As of July 2019, more than 80 percent of TrustPilot reviewers assigned WorldRemit a 5-star rating.
Disclaimer: Please note any provider recommendations, currency forecasts or any opinions of our authors should not be taken as a reference to buy or sell any financial product.
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