It’s a simple matter to send $20 on your mobile phone now — options abound. But what about when you want to send $10 thousand?
USForex has had a mobile app for a while, but it was purely informational. Now users can send money internationally with a few taps of their tablet or smartphone.
What’s unusual about this is that the USForex mobile app is for high-value transactions — its typical users are affluent individuals and treasury managers at corporations. The minimum transaction size is $1,000 U.S., with no upper limit.
The app update with the enhanced functionality went live at the end of July for both Android and iOS.
No money is actually sent using the app, according to David Nicholls, head of alliance partnerships at USForex. Instead, a user wishing to send $10,000 to Australia moves the money from his bank account to USForex, which deposits it in its U.S. bank. The customer then receives a live quote of the exchange rate, which Nicholls said is better than banks offer, and at lower fees.
Then in Australia, (where the company began life as OzForex) money is withdrawn from an Australian bank account and sent to the recipient. The most common uses are buying property overseas, or making rent payments.
OzForex, the parent company, has been in the peer-to-peer money transfer space since 1998. It has sent $50 billion in U.S. currency during that span.
Last year the company transacted more than $12 billion in international money transfers, Nicholls said. “We have documented a 261% rise in users wanting to transact on mobile,” Nicholls said. “By the end of this year, we expect fully 50% of our transactions to be on mobile devices.” Tablets are popular for its users, but smartphones are more popular, Nicholls said.
Isn’t sending large amounts of money over mobile devices risky? Nicholls said the company’s security measures are just as rigorous on mobile devices as on desktop computers. “Our customers are busy people,” Nicholls said. “They don’t want to be tied to a computer.”