The agreement will help facilitate money transfers to mobile subscribers in the region.
International remittances will be facilitated by BICS’s HomeSend, a global hubbing service designed to enable mobile money transfers, which is part of the company’s strategic partnership with eServGlobal.
Daniel Kurgan, CEO at BICS, said the agreement will help open up new remittance corridors and expand the scope of international money transfers. “The first phase of this implementation has made it possible to send money easily and rapidly through Xpress Money’s agents to mobile wallet users in Africa,” he added.
Xpress Money is said to be one of the world’s fastest growing money transfer companies, which offers international reach through 135,000 agent locations across the world.
Mobile subscribers in Africa that use mobile wallet services will be eligible to receive the money transfers facilitated by the agreement.
“Mobile money transfers are the future of the remittance business; with BICS onboard as our partner we will be able to leverage their superior technology platform to offer our customers with a money transfer service right at their finger-tips,” said Sudhesh Giriyan, VP of Xpress Money.
The first phase of mobile money deployments are mainly focussed on domestic person-to-person transfer and bill payments but BICS is already eyeing opportunities for HomeSend in the second phase.
“The next generation of services is going to be things like savings schemes and micro-insurance, and again if you manage to link remittance inflows to those services you can increase their development impact,” said Marianne Pauwel, head product manager of HomeSend at BICS.
