• Home
• Financial Services
• News Article

Visa launches real time remittance service

Wednesday, Jun 08, 2011

Dubai: Expatriates can now send money back home within minutes using new technology unveiled yesterday by global payments technology company Visa .

The company has launched a new platform called Visa Personal Payments that allows UAE customers to send remittances in real time to anyone who has a Visa card, which can be a debit, prepaid, credit, platinum or any other card bearing the Visa logo.

UAE Exchange and the Union Bank of the Philippines have just become the latest financial institutions in the world to adopt the service. Any money transfer to the Philippines using this service will now cost Dh25 per transaction and the funds deposited directly to the Visa card accounts can be used immediately at millions of merchant outlets or withdrawn from ATMs in the Philippines.

Money in minutes

Philippines-issued Visa debit and Visa prepaid cards issued by the Union Bank of the Philippines will receive funds in real time, giving recipients their money in minutes, rather than the two to three days wait normally experienced with bank transfers. “What this means is that if you’re a holder of a Visa card, the money sent to you is there in your account, on your card. You can use it now. There’s no need to go to an agent. If you want cash, yes you need to go to an ATM machine, but you could just take that card and withdraw the money,” Sachin Bountra, Visa Middle East’s business development director told Gulf News.

“In other channels, the money being sent goes to an agent. If you have to go to an agent and pick up the wired funds, technically, it’s not instant. With our service, the money goes straight into the account. There’s nobody holding that money anywhere. The funding source can be cash, another card or bank account. But the recipient needs to have a Visa card,” he added.

Visa is to expand the service. “As we enable more and more cards, you’ll be able to use the service for any manner of requirements, so you can do cross-border remittance, which is what we just launched today. You may have gone out with your friends for a cup of coffee and you need to pay your share of it, so you can just send the money to their card,” said Bountra.

With the new service Visa is expected to secure a portion of the $584 million (Dh2.1 billion) of fund transfers which are conducted every year between the UAE and the Philippines.

Sachin Bountra, Visa Middle East’s business development director, said they chose the Philippines over other remittance corridors because of the high volume. “It’s one of the largest corridors. We chose it also because of the nature of the geography of the country. There are multiple islands. The people there actually have a habit of card usage perhaps better than in other markets,” he said.

A recent report by the central bank of the Philippines showed that remittances from Filipinos overseas coursed through banks and grew by 4.1 per cent in March 2011.

As a result, remittances reached $4.6 billion in the first quarter of this year, 5.9 per cent higher than a year ago.

By Cleofe Maceda, Staff Reporter

© Gulf News 2011. All rights reserved.