The frustrations associated with those types of transactions could disappear with smartphones.
The results of a recent Amdocs survey have shown that over 83 percent of respondents strongly feel that they would be willing to use a mobile technology device for completing international money transfer transactions.
The vast majority of current international money transfer services are not fully satisfying their customers.
Among the survey respondents, 82 percent said they were dissatisfied with their experiences in using more traditional services for international transfers through money transfer operators (MTOs) and banks. Nearly half of the participants (47 percent) said that one of the primary challenges they face is in the speed of the transferring service. They feel that this presents them with a challenge that causes them to feel dissatisfied with the option.
The participants were very interested in using mobile technology to complete the transfers much more quickly.
Of the 47 percent of the respondents who said that speed was a main challenge that they faced with the service they received, 49 percent were using bank transfers, 48 percent were using MTOs, and 46 percent were using transfers over the internet, the majority of the time. Still, it was clear that speed wasn’t the only issue, as a full 83 percent of all the respondents in the survey said they were very interested in using smartphone money transfers to send them internationally.
When looking specifically at the people who currently use MTOs the most, a massive 92 percent of the respondents were interested in using mobile money transfers, feeling that the services and available prices were suitable. This could prove to have quite the disruptive impact on the market as a whole.
According to the Amdocs vice president and head of products, sales and marketing for mobile financial services, Sharath Dorbala, “Mobile has a strong opportunity to disrupt the money transfer business. As a medium, it provides the ultimate convenience in terms of availability, accessibility and ease of use.” She went on to describe the opportunity presented by mobile technology in this area by saying that “This combined with innovative business models have disrupted legacy value chains that were built over years and added unnecessary costs on the consumer.”
