LONDON—Competition is heating up for international remittances.
TransferWise Ltd., the London-based international money transfer service that is considered one of Europe’s more promising financial technology startups, is lowering the fees it charges to send money from the U.K., Bloomberg reported.
“The move comes at a time when TransferWise is facing growing competition from a number of copycat international payments platforms as well as banks and traditional money transfer businesses like The Western Union Co., some of which have lowered their prices to become more competitive with TransferWise,” Bloomberg said.
Kristo Kaarmann, TransferWise’s co-founder and chief executive, told Bloomberg that competitive pressures were not behind the price drop. Instead, he said, TransferWise was trying to fulfill its founding vision of moving toward a system where international bank transfers were free.
“There is no reason that sending money from a bank account in London to one in Aberdeen should be so much cheaper than sending money from London to Paris,” Kaarmann told Bloomberg. He said that from a technical standpoint, sending an email was more difficult than transferring money between bank accounts, so why should international payments cost so much.
The company said in a blog post that it was dropping fees between 7% and 50%, depending on which country the money was being sent to.