Crypto Owners Are 4 Times More Likely to Use Digital Dollar Alternatives for Remittances

The expanded possibilities surrounding cross-border remittances are set to undergo a similar transformation, much like the shift from in-person retail to digital shopping has changed retail over the last decade.

While consumers have a wide range of retail options for transferring funds abroad, the process of actually sending money across borders still has significant challenges, such as excessive, highly variable fees and long processing times, which impedes the remittance experience. As a result, many customers are turning to cryptocurrencies as a payment method in order to avoid some of the drawbacks of traditional methods.

In The Digital Currency Shift: The Cross-Border Remittances Report, a PYMNTS and Stellar Development Foundation collaboration, a survey of nearly 2,100 U.S. consumers discovered that the majority of those who sent remittances already owned cryptocurrency at a rate roughly four times that of the general U.S. population.

Furthermore, despite the rise in cryptocurrency use, the data revealed that 64 percent of consumers used PayPal, making it the most popular remittance method for sending remittances online. Bank transfers (55 percent), mobile wallets (49 percent), and credit cards (48 percent) were the next most popular payment methods.

The study also discovered that, regardless of payment method, trust was the deciding factor in consumers' choice of a specific payment service provider (PSP) 55.7 percent of the time. Other factors to consider included transaction security, fraud prevention, transaction speed, and transaction cost.

Finally, among consumers who already use cryptocurrency for remittance payments, 53% said trust in the brand name of their PSP was important to them, with Remitly, Xe, WorldRemit, and OFX cited as some of the most trusted names in the market.

Source: pymnts.com