I’m excited to share today that Xoom, a leading digital money transfer provider acquired by PayPal last year, has expanded to 11 countries, with two more coming soon.
This means that Xoom’s services will be available in a total of 53 countries. The 13 new receive countries will include Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, Ghana, Haiti, Kenya, Nepal, Nigeria, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Slovakia and Slovenia.
With this expansion, Xoom users will be able to send money from the U.S. to M-Pesa™ accounts in Kenya, in addition to services like cash pick-up and mobile reload in Haiti and Nepal, and bank deposits in Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, Ghana, Nepal, Nigeria, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Slovakia and Slovenia. We are working with some of the world’s leading financial services and mobile wallets including Barclays in Europe, C.A.M. and UniTransfer in Haiti, Bank of Everest in Nepal, and M-Pesa in Kenya to make our services available in these countries.
This geographic expansion speaks to the appetite people across the world have for better remittance options. Remittances are a significant contributor to the economic development of many countries. In markets such as Nepal, remittances represent as much as 25 percent of the country’s GDP. When Xoom enters a new market, we have a history of using technology to help bring remittances costs down, improve customer service and increase the speed and convenience of money transfers. In fact, the World Bank recently published numbers that people sending money from the U.S. to three of Xoom’s largest markets - India, Mexico and the Philippines - have saved $1.2 billion annually in remittances costs between 2008 and 2015. We know that more consumer choice, and digital and mobile technologies have helped to make these savings possible.