SAN JOSE, Calif.—PayPal is launching Xoom, an international digital money transfer service, in the United Kingdom and 31 markets spanning Europe.
The company said “the service will benefit millions,” including more than nine million people living in the U.K., and will pay out remittances to other individuals living in Nigeria, India, China, the Philippines and beyond, across 130 countries, Pymnts.com reported.
The announcement follows an expansion of PayPal’s send-side capability into Canada late last year.
PayPal’s customers in those nations are able to use their login credentials to send money directly across borders and into recipients’ bank accounts, or for cash pickup and delivery through Xoom.
‘Long-Term Secular Trend’
“Overall, PayPal’s Xoom business – and PayPal itself – has seen a long-term secular trend in the digitization and now mobilization of the management and movement of money,” Julian King, general manager of Xoom, told Pymnts.com. “In the specific case of the Xoom services, we saw that it was a market segment that was materially underserved, for whom there had not been appropriate, meaningful innovation.”
The Xoom expansion, King said, should be placed amid the larger context of estimates by the World Bank that as much as $700 billion annually will change hands in P2P remittance transactions. When adding other payment types and wire transfers, that brings cross-border transactions into the trillions of dollars, Pymnts.com noted.