(Bloomberg) -- Wise Plc, the London-based cross-border payments firm, launched its services in Mexico as it seeks to capture a slice of the country’s vast remittance market.
Wise users will be able to send money from Mexico to more than 40 currencies and 160 countries, including transferring Mexican pesos to US dollars, it said in a statement.
That channel also opens up the two-way currency route so Mexican nationals living in the US can make dollar-to-peso transfers as well, according to the company. The dollar-to-peso service is currently the third largest transmission route for Wise’s US customers, with the volume of transfers doubling in the last two years, it said.
“With the potential for further growth, Mexico offers a unique opportunity to serve a large and growing region within Wise’s Americas operations,” the firm said in its statement.
Wise launched in 2011 and has grown quickly since, as the expanding globalization of the workforce increases the need for cross-border payments. Earlier this month, Wise reported underlying income of £349.5 million in the fiscal third quarter and late last year announced a deal to settle foreign-exchange payments for Morgan Stanley’s investment banking corporate clients.
“Importantly, this takes us one step closer in solving the problems of opaque, slow and expensive international money movement,” Harsh Sinha, Wise’s chief technology officer, said in the statement.
Wise-commissioned research found that banks and other money-transferring services in Mexico conceal as much as 10.4% of their costs in hidden fees, the firm said in the statement.
The firm’s expansion into Mexico comes amid uncertainty over the country’s remittance industry, following President Donald Trump’s designation of Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations.
Immigrants use the remittance system to send more than $60 billion a year back to Mexico, and such payments account for nearly 4% of Mexico’s gross domestic product. But some money transfers are sent from the US to relatives to pay migrant smugglers allegedly employed by cartels.
That will likely draw heightened scrutiny to firms that facilitate the payments, while the companies themselves may instate more stringent compliance processes to avoid falling afoul of Trump’s order.
Sinha, however, said that Wise is prepared to navigate sanctions changes that may crop up globally.
“That’s part of doing business,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg. “The reality is, the citizens in Mexico are getting a bad deal and they have needs and we can serve them better.”
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