Mobile carriers and banks are partnering to provide cheaper ways to send money overseas, reports Reuters. This should reduce fees to a few percent, from up to 24 percent for $50. Although it’s possible this could be used to pay for mobile content, the biggest use will be immigrants sending money back to their family — which generates more than $230 billion per year in international money flow. This comes from scale again…around 1 billion people have a bank account and 3 billion have mobile phones, according to Reuters.
Also, Vodafone and Citigroup said they “planned to launch a Vodafone-branded mobile phone and Internet-based money transfer service for remittances, based on Vodafone’s pilot of the M-PESA mobile money transfer service by its affiliate in Kenya, Safaricom”.
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