MoneyGram has teamed-up with South Africa’s First National Bank (FNB) to launch a mobile money transfer service, giving FNB account holders throughout the country an option for sending and receiving international money transfers using their mobile phones. Transactions are available for collection within 10 minutes, subject to an agent’s hours of operation and local laws and regulations.
The new service builds on the existing partnership between the two companies that involved the inclusion of FNB’s branches into MoneyGram’s agent network. This in turn provided customers with nearly 1,000 new MoneyGram money transfer locations across South Africa from which to send and receive money. Now they [customers] no longer need to visit the physical store in order to beam their money and will rather visit these branches only when they need to get hold of cash.
According to the World Bank, there are close to 900,000 South Africans living abroad who send money back to their families. Almost 50% of all remittance users remit funds once a month…