This article will share the method to make Remitly money transfer to a different country. As you read this post, you will learn what options and countries Remitly support for money transfer. Plus, I will reveal my analysis of customer reviews to tell the service quality of this fin-tech firm.
How To Send Money
You can send money to your country following the easy steps.
1. Sign Up
If you haven’t signed up Remitly, join the service on their website or you can simply download the Remitly app from the App Store or Google Play Store.
2. Enter Details
Put the details of the country you want to send money to. You will be required to select the country, your email address, and a password. After this step, you will also need to enter the remittance amount, the recipient’s details, and your payment details. Depending on your country, you can select one of three options – debit card, credit card, or bank.
3. Confirm and Send
As the final step, check the details before making a transfer. Once confirmed, send your funds.
How much is it for transfer?
The price of a service or a product is everyone’s interest before making a purchase decision. How much is Remitly? That depends on several factors that include transfer amount, speed option, and your recipient country. Let’s say you are sending to India. If you plan to send more than $1,000USD, that’s great! There will be no charge. Remily will only charge you when you send less than $1,000, which is $3.99 per transfer. The same rate, $3.99, applies to both Express and Economy options.
Please note that this rule applies to India only as of August 1, 2019. If you send to a different country, the rates will be different. In case of the Philippines, you will only have to pay $3.99 for the amount of less than $500. The same rate goes to Express and Economy. If you send more than $500, it will be free for Economy. However, it will still be $3.99 for Express even if you send more than $500.
Since it varies depending on your options, the best way to check is by visiting Remitly’s website. For this, I put the link at the bottom of this post under the Useful Links section. When you visit the like, please also check the exchange rate by speed option. I saw that sometimes it is different from your speed option.
How fast is it?
I just mentioned that the same rate is applied for both Economy and Express options. Then how fast are they? That can differ from your country. For example, I will use India as a target country.
Economy
If you can wait for 3 to 5 business days for your funds to arrive, you can save fees by choosing Economy. The speed can be different by country.
Express
Express is a paid option that allows funds to be transferred faster. If you are sending to India, Remitly explains that it will take within minutes when you use a debit card. So if you are urgent, Express will be a good option.
How can I track progress?
After you sent your funds, you can check the progress on the Remitly website or Remitly app. If you are using the website, sign in to your account and find Transaction history. On that menu, you will see a list of all the transactions in progress and finished delivery. If you are using the app, you will automatically be guided into the Transfers menu. Actually, you don’t have to constantly check your status. When your transfer is started and finished, Remitly sends you a notification.
Also, the recipient receives a notification. There are other cases when you receive a notification.
- One of the Remitly partners is reviewing your transfer.
- You changed the name of your recipient.
- Your transfer is delayed for any reason.
I want to change or cancel my transfer
Ok, you can make a mistake. That’s what people do. Good news is there is still a window where you can change or cancel your fund transfer. But, remember changing and canceling are not always available. To change, your transfer status should be in pending delivery or available for pick up. While your transfer is in that status, you can do the following:
- Change the recipient’s name
- Switch the transfer to another saved recipient
- Edit a saved recipient’s name
- Add a brand new recipient to the transfer
Remitly explains that you can cancel most transfers as long as the recipient has not received the funds. You can use the Transaction history menu on the web or the Transfers menu on the app to cancel your transfer.
Photo by Artem Beliaikin on Unsplash
Cash Pickup, Delivery, and Mobile Wallet
These days, when you make an international transfer using a service like Remitly, they have this option, Cash Pickup or Delivery to the recipient’s doorstep. I reviewed a similar international remittance firm, Xoom, a Paypal company in my blog. They also had these options for transfer. I believe that these are very thoughtful services, which you cannot find from traditional banks. How is that possible?
Please note that these options are not for every country. Remitly has made a partnership with thousands of businesses worldwide. And they enable Remitly to start and continue these services. Since international fund transfer is regulated differently by each country, these options can have some differences depending on your country. The best way is to visit and select a country.
Fees Comparison
Remitly confidently compares their fees with competitors. This is obviously to say that they are the cheapest. Check the rates below.
- Pay with bank account
- Remitly: $0 Economy 3-5 business days
- Western Union: $3.99 4 business days
- Xoom: $4.99 in minutes
- Pay with debit card
- Remitly: $3.99 Express in minutes
- Western Union: $7.00 in minutes
- Xoom: $5.00 in minutes
In terms of the rates, Remitly offers the cheapest option. However, with Xoom, transfer arrives in minutes even if you use your bank account for the payment. If you want to find out more about Xoom, please check my review post.
So far we have discovered how to use Remitly in detail. In the next section, we will learn how the actual users’ experience is with Remitly. From that, we can learn if Remitly provides a reliable and safe service to its customers.
How People Think About Remitly
When you see product introduction from a company, you will always hear great things about it. No company will reveal any weaknesses or defects of the product, obviously. So, as a consumer, it is wiser to doubt what they say and do your own research before making a final purchase decision. In this section, we will learn how actual users think about Remitly. How can we measure these? We can do this by using data analysis techniques called sentiment analysis.
You don’t have to be scared by the technical term. I did the technical part and you can just look at pretty graphs. In this section, I will show you two types of graphs – word cloud and customer sentiment chart. For the analysis, I’ve compiled more than 15,000 customer reviews from TrustPilot and conducted analysis to summarize them. I will show you the result in a word cloud and a customer sentiments chart. And, lastly, I will share a Remitly’s Google trend result that shows the level of interest from people.
Word Cloud
Word cloud is one of the great and fun ways to understand customer sentiments toward a product or a service. In a word cloud, you can see specific words in different sizes. The larger it is, the more people used that word to describe the product. For this word cloud, I used the titles of the reviews, since people put the essence of their opinions in the title. The 15,000+ reviews allowed me to generate an interesting word cloud that let me reach a positive conclusion. Let’s have a look!
Understanding the word cloud is easy. Just follow your eyes and see what you see. You will see that most of the big words are all positive. This means that customers have had a positive experience with their product and service. People used words like “fast”, “easy”, “excellent”, “good”, “reliable”, and many more positive terms to describe this transfer platform.
In the word cloud, I could find that people also often mentioned “reliable” and “safe”. In my opinion, these descriptions are very important since this service deals with real money. Having these words means that we can trust their service.
Customer Sentiments
In the word cloud, we were able to observe what descriptive words people used to talk about Remitly. As mentioned, the word cloud is based on the titles of customer reviews, but the sentiment analysis graph was generated by the contents of the reviews. In the sentiment analysis, we will see more specific types of feeling that people showed in their review. In the analysis, you can see 10 different sentiments such as positive, negative, trust, anticipation, joy, fear, sadness, anger, surprise, and disgust.
The technology behind the chart is straightforward. The analysis algorithm holds 10 different lists – each list containing words that are mapped to one of the 10 sentiments. When this algorithm runs, it checks and matches with one of the sentiments. When matched, it is counted as one and is categorized in one of the 10 sentiments. My analysis on the positive reviews appears as below.
The chart is also not difficult to understand. You can see that the positive sentiment is ranked number one. The first rank is followed by “negative”, “trust”, “anticipation” and “fear”. It does have some negative opinions, but overall, people expressed more positive sentiments than negative ones. So my customer review analysis told me that many people have a positive experience with the online platform.
Google Trend
As the final segment of analysis, let me share the trend of Remitly. I used Google Trend to check how frequently “Remitly” is searched on Google over the past 5 years. Google Trend is a useful tool to measure the interest of people. The more frequently people search on Google, the more popular or trendy it is. The Google Trend (may not visible on a mobile phone) of the money transfer platform below shows that people have increasingly shown an interest in Remitly over that period.
If this trend continues, the level of interest is likely to go up in the future as well. Please note that the trend is from the world. If I divide it by country, we can see that the largest interest came from Canada. It also tells that the second biggest interest came from the Philippines followed by Nicaragua, the United States, and the United Kingdom.
Conclusion
In this post, we learned how to make Remitly money transfer to your country. Due to the different regulations of each country, you need to check your rates and transfer time using the Remitly website. Please check the link below. In addition, my analysis of Remitly reviews revealed that most of the actual users had a great experience with Remitly. So, you are planning to remit your funds with Remitly, I would say don’t worry, you are in good hands.
Useful Links
- Check your fees: Link to check your fee by choosing your country
- Earn rewards: Refer a friend to Remitly to earn reward
