Global money transfer services provider MoneyGram has expanded in Brazil with a partnership agreement with São Paulo-based Confidence Câmbio. Brazilians can now use MoneyGram services at 69 Confidence Câmbio stores across the country. The second biggest global money transfer agent after Western Union, MoneyGram transfers about $20 billion a year.
Brazil’s inbound remittances, according to the World Bank, totaled $2.6 billion in 2012, with money primarily sent from the U.S., Japan and Spain. Outbound remittances totaled nearly $1 billion, with funds mainly sent to Spain, Portugal and Japan.
“Aligning with Confidence Câmbio will assist with growth in this important market, and will help MoneyGram meet the growing consumer demand for money transfers in Brazil,” said Pedro Saro Campos, vice president, Latin America, Mexico and Caribbean at MoneyGram.
Confidence Câmbio – a subsidiary of Confidence Group, which owns the first foreign exchange bank in the country – offers a variety of money transfer services.
The partnership with MoneyGram, which has a global network of 336,000 agents, will bolster Câmbio’s strategy to tap Latin America’s lucrative remittances segment. “We expect to double our participation in the international remittances segment,” said Andreas Wiemer, vice president of the Confidence Group.
In South America alone, MoneyGram has more than 12,000 agents, while many of the region’s best known banks – such as Bancolombia in Colombia; Banco de Credito in Peru, and Banco Vision in Paraguay – are its agents.
Remittances are mainly small amounts sent regularly by migrants to their families back home. As Latin American countries have a large number of migrants in the United States, transferring remittances has become a huge industry in its own right.
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