Remittance/Money Transfer to the Philippines

That is odd....right now I'm seeing $7.99 for using a bank account and the debit/credit card is much higher than paying with a debit/credit card (it almost always is more expensive to pay that way).

Xoom USD to USD:


Xoom: USD to PHP:


Xoom's current exchange rate: 45.72 PHP.
M. Lhuillier's current exchange rate is 46.53 PHP.
The real current exchange rate is: 47.10 PHP.

Total cost with Xoom USD to PHP:
$1,004.99 = P47,335.03
Xoom is only giving me P45.719 to the dollar so I'm losing:
P47,335.03 - P45,719.50 = P1,615.53

Total cost with Xoom USD to USD:
$1,007.99 = P47,476.33
Exchanging with M. Lhuillier gets me P46.53 to the dollar so I'm losing:
P47,476.33 - P46,530.00 = P946.33

So if I only sent myself $1k/month I would be losing:
P1,615.53 - P946.33 = P669.20

Unfortunately, I can't seem to live off just $1k/month here; I would say I send myself around $1,500 to $2,000 per month. So my monthly losses on letting Xoom do the exchange rate would be somewhere in the range of P1,000 to P1,350 (around $20 to $30).

Spoiler: Not a lot of money but.....

......here's how I look at it:

(I'll average the potential monthly losses to P1,200.)

Half of the savings could go towards rum:
Tanduay 750mL @ the local sari2x = P80
P600 ÷ P80 = 7.5 bottles of rum

The other half to coke (the kind that goes well with rum.... )
Coke 1.5L @ local sari2x = P55
P600 ÷ P55 = 11 bottles of coke

Which ends up giving you a nice 1:3 ratio of, well, rum:coke. Coincidence? FYI, that comes out to a a bit more than 125 rum:cokes per month (about 4 per day).

Might be worth noting that I wrote all the above last night while putting those USD to USD transfer savings to good use, at least I think that was last night .....wouldn't be surprised if the maths above is completely off the mark.

A bit too risky for me, I would never let anyone know when or where I would be coming into possession of $3k USD in this country.

 

A lot of this has to do with what country the company is registered in. Countries have their own money laundering laws that these types of companies must follow. On top of these laws companies can also set their own fraud prevention policies. Online fraud is a major problem, especially for companies dealing with cash services...and especially to ones servicing extremely morally corrupt countries like the Philippines. They are constantly bombarded with scammers and hackers attempting to circumvent their security measure.

For smaller remittances most of these companies only require you to link a credit/debit card and bank account. What they don't (sometime) tell you is that they have daily, weekly, monthly, bi-yearly and yearly sending limits. Usually the daily and monthly limits are clearly posted on their sites. They don't publicly publish other limitations as they don't want to give away their security measures. Example: If they told you up front that they only allow $10k USD to be sent every 6 months then scammers could send up to $9999.99 and then create a new account. I have personally hit these limits (I don't remember how much it was at the time) with Xoom and was forced to prove who I was, how much I get paid and sign an anti-money laundering agreement. They bumped my sending limit up to a good percentage of my yearly salary.

There are probably lots of other triggers they have put in place. I'd guess that they also have a list of IP addresses that they get a lot of fraud attempts from. I suspect since a lot of the member IP addresses trip my spam/fraud triggers on this forum - because ISPs in the Philippines hide their users behind a proxy IP addresses (IPv4 is out of new IP addresses, or will be very soon. There isn't addresses enough to go around.) - that they are requiring you to prove who you are due to that.

I also believe the Philippine Government is working with these remittance companies to identify/stop drug money. The government may be sharing all, or part, of their drug personality list with these companies. My Xoom account was locked several years ago because I sent money to a certain individual for repairs to one of my motorcycles. The guy was later arrested on drug charges (released months after without a conviction). I would normally chalk that up to coincidence but after several calls with Xoom trying to get my account unlocked I found out the guy was on some type of "blacklist". I have a strong suspicion that it was either due to alleged drug activity or for funneling money out of a certain country that had international sanctions in place.

You may also want to read the fine print/terms a service of those remittance companies. Many have a section that says you are not allowed to send money to anyone (including yourself) for any type of service or product...some even state that their service is not to be used to send money to yourself. If you admit to doing anything against their terms of service they will likely blacklist you and your bank accounts/credit cards and not amount of begging will get a response from them.

Do these companies share security information with their competition? I'm not sure....but I suspect there is likely some opensource fraud/spam database they all reference and contribute to and many of them have security IT personnel that visit many of the same forums/conventions to share ideas/best practices.

Much of what is above is just a guess of how I think they do their security. They aren't going to tell you, me or anyone else what measures they take and why they sometimes require more documents and other times not.