Vacation season is already knocking on the door. Rest is, of course, a pleasant thing, but not cheap either. Calculating in advance all the expenses that await in an exciting summer trip is sometimes not possible. Then you have to call relatives, friends or family, tearfully asking: urgently send money. Therefore, it is very important to know how various money transfer systems work, what their commission fees are. Let's try to find the optimal ratio of their price and quality.
The scheme of operation of most modern money transfer systems without opening an account is quite simple. The client fills out a form, in which he indicates his and the recipient's last name and first name, the region of dispatch, as well as the amount to be transferred. The whole procedure takes no more than five minutes. After that, you must pay a percentage at the cashier for the transfer and part with the amount to be transferred. Almost immediately, the operator gives a ten-digit control number, which is strictly confidential and should be known only to the recipient and sender. Further, all information about your transfer is sent to a single server, where it is stored until the recipient comes for the money at the nearest bank branch.
To receive money, you need to introduce yourself and answer the question of who you are expecting a money transfer from. Sometimes company employees may ask for the answer to a security question, but more often than not, this additional verification of the recipient's identity is omitted. Of course, both the person sending the money and the person receiving it must have documents. Within the country, this is a general civil passport with permanent residence registration; outside the country, a foreign passport.
Urgency is a very relative concept. Some people will need money, say, for an unplanned but very necessary purchase tomorrow, or even in a week. And someone has been so strapped for cash that today they have nothing to even have lunch in the most modest fast food. And since the commission in the form of a percentage of the amount sent depends primarily on the speed of transfer, it is better to find out in advance, 'without nerves,' how critical the extra minutes, hours, or days are for the recipient of the funds. After all, paying extra, and if the amount is considerable, quite tangible money for the wallet, is not at all necessary.
It is much easier to solve the problem if both the sender and recipient have bank accounts and time is not an issue. In this case, funds are simply transferred from one account to another. The undoubted advantage of this simple operation is that the geography of sending becomes much wider, because banks, unlike regular money transfer systems, are present almost everywhere. In order for the money to reach where it needs to go, they use the RCC or SWIFT systems, as well as a system of their own correspondent accounts. One of the main advantages of this method is its relative cheapness; however, you have to pay for it with time, but, as we have already noted, time should not be critical for the recipient. The term for a simple transfer is three to five days; for an urgent transfer, 24 hours. Also, you should prepare for a little paperwork, in particular, signing a contract, opening an account (if it doesn't exist yet); in short, speed is hardly achievable here.
Another most important factor that determines the cost of a transfer is its geographical direction. If we take systems with account opening, the commission charged is most often standard and ranges from 3 to 5% of the amount sent in currency. For money systems without account opening, there is a wider range in terms of cost. The difference is sometimes such that it is extremely difficult to choose exactly what you need.
Alexey KILICHEV. 