Why Bitcoin Remittance Services Should Leave the 'Bitcoin' Part Out
Luis Buenaventura is head of product at Satoshi Citadel Industries, the parent company of Rebit.ph, a Philippine bitcoin-based remittance service. The sister cities of Hong Kong and Macau currently house more than 200,000 migrant Filipinos between them. The breakdown is fairly homogenous in terms of occupation: the largest group consists of 160,000 Filipinas working on Foreign Domestic Helper visas on the Hong Kong side, with a little under 17,000 on the Macau side. Together, the two groups transferred over $380m back to their families in the Philippines in 2013, amounting to between 30%....
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Hong Kong-based Bitspark Limited, a bitcoin remittance company, has announced a new partnership with Malaysian Vitaxel Group. Vitaxel Group, which specializes in multi-level marketing, has more than 5000 distributors in 16 Asian countries. And together, they aim to expand the bitcoin remittance services throughout Southeast Asia (S.E.A). Remittance in....
The Philippines has the world's third largest remittance market just behind India and China, with overseas remittances reaching more than $25.1 billion in 2013. But due to the country's poor banking systems and expensive remittance services, overseas Filipino workers and the local workers working far from their provinces have always searched for alternative systems for transferring cash. For generations, remittance services including Lhuiller and Palawan Pawnshop dominated the market in the Philippines, despite its high transaction fees. On average, the fees are close to 10 percent for....
A bitcoin exchange and a remittance company have partnered to offer customers fiat-to-bitcoin deposit services across Latin America. Bitex.la has joined with More Money Transfers (MMT), a Latin American remittances company in what they claim is the first alliance of its kind. However, the partnership, said Bitex chief marketing officer Manu Beaudroit, isn't meant to provide remittance services in bitcoin, but instead, enable more people into contact and activity with the digital currency. Speaking to CoinDesk, Beaudroit voiced his belief that bitcoin holds some of the greatest promise for....
When I first interviewed Miguel regarding Rebit, I was intrigued not just from a journalist standpoint, but as a Filipino. Sending money is quite expensive, especially when using conventional services, such as Xoom or Western Union. So when Miguel agreed to allow me to test the service, I was thrilled. Bitcoin is a great candidate for remittance, as the low fee required to send (known as the miners fee, currently around $0.06) and the near-instant transaction speeds fix traditional remittance services downfalls. The process is just as easy as it is explained in my interview with Rebit, I....
In 2010, more than $5 billion was sent back home from Indonesian migrant workers across the world, up 2.44 percent from 2009 ($4.91 billion). That number may seem huge but, in the grand scheme of things, it's very small. Through the process of remittance, $436 billion looked to be sent back home in total during 2014 - before the banks took their cut through fees. According to a report by the World Bank, in 2013 the global average cost of sending remittances was 8.58 percent - a decline from the previous year but a large cut nonetheless. If a similar average fee remained in 2010, as a....