Wealth & Finance International - Fintech Awards 2017

2017 Fintech Awards 8 Best International Money Transfer Comparison Platform 2017 The Money Cloud Ltd is an international money transfer comparison site that’s focused on giving clients clear, honest information, so they can choose the best way to send money overseas. We invited Huw Jenkins, co-Founder and CTO, to tell us more about the firm and how it has come to achieve the phenomenal success it enjoys today. Contact: Huw Jenkins Contact Email: [email protected] Address: 58 Davies Street, London, W1K 5JF, UK Phone: + 44 (0) 207 100 5655 Website: www.themoneycloud.com Focused on its clients, The Money Cloud Ltd work hard to make it easier for people to send money overseas. Huw outlines to us what services the company offers and the ideas behind the company. “After three years of hard work developing and launching our product to market, it is an honour being recognised as the best in class for overseas money transfer comparison, especially as we invented the whole concept over a decade ago. We have developed The Money Cloud platform from the ground up based upon our combined knowledge of over a combined twenty plus years in the industry. The Money Cloud was designed to provide individuals and businesses the tools needed to maximise the number of savings made when transferring money internationally.” “The main challenge has been that we operate in a global market and are useful to people and businesses from all walks of life – from overseas workers sending money back to their friends and family; to purchasing an overseas property; to SMEs making overseas payments regularly. With this in mind, we have spent time in building a scalable platform, that is accessible and offers a comparison of money transfer services from almost everywhere around the world. Initially we have focussed on UK outbound money transfers, but we are now starting to gain traction from overseas –US, China, South Africa, Eurozone and the Middle East most notably. The worldwide remittance industry is worth $582 billion using2015figures, according to the World Bank, who have also been monitoring the costs of sending money abroad across different regions since September 2008. The overall retail FX market is thought to be in the region of $13 Trillion per annum. The latest numbers show that the current global average cost of sending money abroad in Q1 2017 was 7.455% of the total transaction–a slight increase on the 7.4% recorded in Q4 2016. This goes to show that there is plenty of work still to be done.” Discussing the challenges in the financial industry, Huw notes that the competition for advertising and winning accounts is fierce. The firm’s unique approach gives it the tools to tap into the traffic of these sites at a minimal cost. “The World Bank’s report also showed that banks are still the world’s most expensive remittance service providers, with an average charge of 11.2%. Since records began in Q3 2014, average costs have dropped from a Q1 2009 high of 9.7% by 2.2percentage points, to just below 8%. This is a great advertisement for the work that fintech disruptors have been doing in challenging the monopoly that banks and money transfer companies, such as Western Union and Ria Money Transfer, who also charge high fees and quote unfair exchange rates, had enjoyed until the turn of the decade. When marketing a project of this kind, the competition for paid-for digital advertising is fierce, going head-to-head with companies such as Transferwise, Travelex and MoneyCorp – who all have enormous marketing budgets. “To compete in this market, over the past year we have developed The Money Cloud API for inclusion of our money transfer comparison tool on third party sites. This has just been launched and we are in negotiation for the inclusion on a number of well-known sites–one of the mainstream UK price comparison sites, a world leading e-commerce platform and an international property portal to name a few. Our unique approach gives us the tools to tap into the traffic of these sites at a minimal cost. Next year will see the much-vaunted PSD2 regulations put into place. An upgrade on the existing protocol, it is anticipated to be easier than ever before for disruptive fintech services to access customers financial account details (with their permission, of course) and carry out transactions on their behalf. “This latest innovations means that we will be able to reproduce the real-time exchange rates offered by some of London and the wider FIN17005