Moneygram and Ripple are slashing fees

The announcement last week that Ripple had entered a strategic partnership with international money transfer giant Moneygram was just one of many significant news items in crytpo. Many are now seeing Moneygram adverts appear in their webpages and these seem to indicate that Moneygram and Ripple are slashing fees as the ads show us a fee of only $0,99.

The strategic partnership involves Ripple agreeing to provide a capital commitment to MoneyGram, which enables the company to draw up to $50 million in exchange for equity over a two-year period.  The partnership focuses on Ripple’s X-Rapid product which settles instantly thanks to XRP, the native cryptocurrency of the XRP-Ledger.

 

Image: Moneygram fees.

Moneygram and Ripple are slashing fees

XRP provides the real-time bridge between the currency of the sender and that of the receiver, and thanks to the 2-3 second settlement time it almost completely removes price volatility. The adverts many of us are now seeing on our PC’s and smartphones (thanks google..) are showing a price of $0.99 for a transfer to the Philippines which seems very cheap and in accordance with the increased speed and lower volatility of X-Rapid bridging XRP. So let’s take a look and see if Moneygram and Ripple are slashing fees.

In an article dated as recently as April 14th Investopedia ran a price check on international transfers using both Moneygram and Western Union. Fees for transfers using a credit or debit card ranged from $9,99 to $46 using Moneygram and between $5 and $75 using Western Union depending on the country you were sending money to. As mentioned previously we are based in The Netherlands and we have family in the UK so lets go ahead and send an aunt 400 euros using Moneygram and Western Union today (24th June 2019):

Moneygram Fees:

Western Union Fees:

Western Union vs Moneygram Fees

In the price check above our dear old Aunt in the UK receives nearly 10GBP cash in hand more from Moneygram  than through Western Union. It should be noted that some currency exchange fees are different between the two depending on the countries. In some cases Western Union has a more favorable rate.

The key point here is that we would be charged a fee of 0.99 euros on top of our 400 euro tx by Moneygram (remember the Investopedia article mention from $9,99 to $46) and a whopping 29(!) euros fee by Western Union (Investopdia had them in the 5-75$ fees range). It should be noted that the fees for both merchants were the same irrespective of how the money was sent (debit/credit card, bank transfer or cash).

The difference in fees being 29x higher using Western Union is alarming, and a clear indication that the anticipation of the full implementation of X-Rapid XRP settlement is already making a significant difference in fees in favor of Moneygram.

A point of note however is that with the currency transfers being bridged using X-Rapid XRP as per the strategic agreement, we are expecting to see the currency exchange fees settle down at Moneygram in the very near future. Using XRP removes the volatility in prices and there will be no excuse for Moneygram customers receiving less of their currency than Western Union customers at point of receipt whatever the currency they receive. We will be keeping an eye on this over the coming weeks and months as full implementation comes. One thing is for sure, comparing April to post partnership announcement Moneygram and Ripple are slashing fees!

Money Gram Fees Update 27/06/2019:

As a result of this article some of the viewers of the tweet took it upon themselves to compare the prices in their country in the same way we did. It would appear that the Money Gram Fees price check that we ran in this article is not an isolated incident, and the 29x higher fees we encountered from The Netherlands are nothing compared to the case in other countries. We have included their tweets for your reference:

https://twitter.com/Naturallypaid__/status/1143198420116627456

Australia to Mexico – $50 vs $1 pic.twitter.com/zcpPDiExhd

— Crypto Sausage (@sausagecryptos) June 25, 2019

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