If you’re an expat, a traveller, or you’re involved in any form of international business, being able to send money overseas and exchange currencies cheaply is super important. So what is the cheapest way to transfer money internationally?

If your first reaction had anything to do with ‘my bank’ or ‘Paypal,’ chances are you’ve been getting fleeced on your international transfers. In this post we’re going to explain why most people pay too much for transfers – and how you can avoid getting caught in the same trap.

Why are international transfers so expensive?

The short answer is: they shouldn’t be. The reality is that the traditional ways of sending money overseas, like the banks and the big-name transfer providers, are big bloated organizations with a lot of fixed costs to cover. They have to rent buildings, pay a lot of employees, and cover massive marketing budgets. Guess how they pay for all that?

That’s right – they tack the cost onto your transactions. High street real estate doesn’t come cheap. This means the fees most people are paying to transfer money overseas are grossly out of proportion to the actual cost involved for the banks and transfer companies to process those payments.
In the case of some big transfer providers, this doesn’t even translate into good service – you end up paying a premium for a shoddy product.

How do online services make international transfers cheaper?

So the obvious solution for a company looking to deliver the cheapest way to transfer money internationally was to go totally online.

By going 100% online, we provide a new & better service now offering much cheaper international transfer fees than other establishments – check for yourself by viewing our international transfer fee table. By simply by leveraging the power of the Internet, we eliminate all those costs that normally inflate the price of transfers.

Why does it matter?

We’ve almost become desensitized to stories about greedy banks these days – but there’s a major reason why high fees and hidden exchange rates are a problem on more than just a personal level.

A difference of a few percentage points on a small transaction may not seem like a big deal. But over thousands of transactions, that adds up to billions of dollars that stay in the coffers of banks and transfer companies, rather than making it to their intended destination.

Part of the OrbitRemit philosophy is to help even the playing field for people who remit money by offering much lower fees, along with flat-rate transfer fees rather than fees based on a percentage of the transaction.

How much cheaper is it?

Let’s do a little comparison between a typical bank transfer versus an OrbitRemit transfer.

If you send £360 from the UK to Australia with your bank you are likely to be paying somewhere between 8-10% of the total value when you consider the loss on the poor exchange rate, the up-front charges and the receiving fees paid at the other end.

This equates to a cost of somewhere between £28.00-£36.00, a significant amount when considering the relatively small sum being sent.  The other problem with this is you are unsure exactly what will be received by your beneficiary as the bank are often ‘unable’ to tell you what the exact receiving fees are or even worse quote you an actual exchange rate at the time of making the payment.

You wouldn’t buy a pair of shoes without knowing exactly what they cost, so why would you send money having no idea of the actual costs?

By comparison, the same transfer done through OrbitRemit would be processed at a much more fair and open exchange rate much closer to the actual market rate.

If you’re sending or receiving money on a regular basis, or you deal with much larger sums you can see how the numbers add up pretty quickly and the savings are drastic.

Feel free to use our exchange rate calculator to see how much money would come out the other end on your next transfer, so you can see for yourself how much you’d save over your usual provider.
 

Visit OrbitRemit to easily transfer money today.