Remitly Global, Inc. (Remitly) operates as a provider of digital financial services that transcend borders.
With a global footprint spanning more than 170 countries, Remitly’s digitally native, cross-border payments app delights customers with a fast, reliable, and transparent money movement experience.
Services
The company provides a digital cross-border remittance product that is accessible via its mobile app or the web. Customers are able to set up an account and start sending money to in...
Remitly Global, Inc. (Remitly) operates as a provider of digital financial services that transcend borders.
With a global footprint spanning more than 170 countries, Remitly’s digitally native, cross-border payments app delights customers with a fast, reliable, and transparent money movement experience.
Services
The company provides a digital cross-border remittance product that is accessible via its mobile app or the web. Customers are able to set up an account and start sending money to international recipients generally within minutes. Recipients can receive funds in multiple ways using the company’s diversified, high-quality global disbursement network. Customers can also track the status of their transactions as they are processed. Customers predominantly engage with the company via their mobile phones, either using the app or website, shifting what traditionally required waiting in line to speak with an agent to handheld devices. Providing customers with a convenient, easy, and safe mobile experience underpins the company’s approach to product development, marketing, and customer success.
The company’s remittance revenue is earned from transaction fees charged to customers who are sending remittances, and the foreign exchange spreads between the foreign exchange rate offered to customers and the foreign exchange rate on its currency purchases.
While the company’s journey began in digital cross-border remittances, it continues to evolve and invest in its technology to deepen relationships with customers and attract new customers by adding relevant services and features.
Substantially all of the company’s revenue is generated from digital cross-border remittances.
Strategy
The company operates in a large and fragmented cross-border payments market that provides financial products and services to approximately 1.0 billion customers around the world.
The company's strategies are to deliver a fast, reliable, and seamless end-to-end transaction experience that is tailored and localized to meet the needs of its global customer base; hyper-localized marketing at attractive unit economics; unlock incremental customers, corridor types, and geographies; and deepen customer relationships, including adjacent and novel use cases.
Global Network
The company’s global network of funding and disbursement partners is at the core of its business. Over the last decade, it has strategically expanded and improved the quality of its network in existing corridors to provide customers with increasing disbursement options and in new corridors as part of its expansion strategy. A key focus of the company’s global network strategy is continuing to expand the number of direct integrations with local partners. These direct integrations allow for a better customer experience and lower costs, and are a significant competitive advantage. The company’s partners, including those that are among the most trusted and recognized brands around the world, create a broad and effective payment acceptance (pay-in) and payment delivery (pay-out) ecosystem for customers:
Payment acceptance. The company has relationships with banks and payment processors and networks. These relationships provide customers an array of payment (or pay-in) options to fund remittances with a bank account, card-based payments, and alternative payment methods.
The company can accept and settle transfers from hundreds of millions of consumer bank accounts, payment methods, such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, as well as Visa and Mastercard credit and debit cards. As a digital service, it typically does not have sending agents who accept cash.
Payment disbursement. The company provides broad access to disbursement options for customers, including cash and digital disbursement options. Its broad disbursement network provides peace of mind and allows customers to choose whatever method works best for their family and friends to receive funds. The company has access to many disbursement partners across the globe, including major banks, aggregators, cash pick-up, and mobile wallet partners. These relationships provide customers with a choice of disbursement and enable the company to send funds within minutes, or even seconds, to over 5.0 billion bank accounts and mobile wallets, and approximately 470,000 cash pick-up options (including retail outlets and banks).
The company selects its disbursement partners based on recipients’ preferences, quality of service, cost, brand recognition, and co-branding opportunities. Its disbursement partners make it a trusted source of remittances because customers are typically already familiar with their chosen disbursement partner, and recipients feel comfortable receiving money where they regularly bank or shop. In addition, the company only selects disbursement partners that meet or exceed its geographic coverage goals in the regions in which they operate; its robust compliance and regulatory requirements; and its specific operating metrics, such as creditworthiness and error rates.
As a result of its significant global presence, the company is able to establish multi-faceted partnerships. These partnerships enable the ability to source and settle foreign exchange rates locally, accept payments, or deposit customer funds directly to customer accounts. In addition, it has redundancies built into its global network for its various partnerships.
The company’s customers primarily send money from the United States and Canada. Customers and their recipients are located in over 170 countries around the world; its receive countries include India, Mexico, and the Philippines.
Technology
The Company’s Technology
The company’s purpose-built technology powers localized consumer experiences, enables a robust network of partner integrations, and uses data to optimize business performance, while enabling its ability to expand into complementary new products.
The company’s technology has broad and complex capabilities and, together with its proprietary data, gives it a distinct advantage in understanding its customers and being able to meet their needs. Given the scale of its business, the local nuances of the regions it serves, and the complexity of digital cross-border payments, investments in its technology have positioned it for efficiency and continued growth. The company’s technology comprises the following:
Core transaction engine that underpins the entire transaction lifecycle along with a sophisticated pricing engine that enables ongoing price optimization;
Customer experience interface, across Android, iOS, and Web with corridor-specific user journeys and multilingual self-service or real-time support;
Disbursement network for partner integrations that supports a diverse set of disbursement methods for customers and their recipients in over 170 countries;
The company’s electronic Know Your Customer (‘KYC’), machine learning-based fraud scoring, and payment authentication processes that all take place in real-time to give customers immediate feedback and are in compliance with highly complex and continuously evolving global and local regulations; and
Marketing technology stack that enables the company’s marketing team to efficiently operate and improve the quality of customer experiences by supporting its localization strategies and efficiently capturing and analyzing data to ensure maximum long-term return on its marketing investments.
Customer Experience
The company strives to make each customer interaction on its digital products intuitive and free of unnecessary friction. New customers can typically initiate a transaction with only a few taps after setting up their account and adding their recipient’s information. The company has further streamlined the experience for existing customers completing repeat transactions. In addition, it recognizes that customers' needs and preferences vary across corridors and continues to localize the customer journey in select corridors, from language, to product selection, to the specific flow and product options. Finally, when errors or delays do occur, the company strives to enable customers to take control of the issues and resolve them directly within its product, whenever possible.
The company invests substantial resources and relies on data and insights to understand customers’ needs in order to continually innovate to deliver even richer features, products, and services. It, therefore, has significant resources dedicated to technology and development across multiple teams, including product, engineering, design, analytics, compliance, marketing, and customer service. These teams are responsible for the envisioning, design, development, and testing of the company’s services. The company focuses the majority of its investment on developing new functionality, making it accessible and relevant globally, improving customer experience and optimizing fraud loss rates, and further enhancing the usability, reliability, and performance of its services.
Regulatory Environment
In the United States, the company’s business is subject to federal anti-money laundering (‘AML’) laws, regulations, and supervisory guidance, which includes the Bank Secrecy Act (as amended, the ‘BSA’), as well as similar state laws, regulations, and supervisory guidance. The BSA, among other things, requires companies engaged in money transmission to register with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (‘FinCEN’) of the U.S. Department of the Treasury as money services businesses and to develop and maintain risk-based AML programs, report suspicious activity, and collect and maintain information about their customers and certain transaction records.
The company’s business must also comply with U.S. economic and trade sanctions programs administered by the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (‘OFAC’), and with similar sanctions administered by sanctions authorities in other jurisdictions in which it operates or where it is licensed.
The company is subject to regulations imposed by the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (the ‘FCPA’) in the United States, the Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act in Canada (‘CFPOA’), the U.K. Bribery Act in the United Kingdom, and similar laws in the other jurisdictions in which it or its disbursement partners or disbursement sub-partners operate, which generally prohibit companies and those acting on their behalf from making improper payments to foreign government officials for the purpose of influencing official action or otherwise gaining an unfair business advantage, such as obtaining or retaining business.
In the United States, the company is registered as a Money Services Business with FinCEN, and it holds licenses to operate as a money transmitter (or its equivalent) in the 48 states where such licenses are required, as well as in the District of Columbia and various the U.S. Territories.
In Canada, the company is registered with the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada as a money services business and is pending registration with the Bank of Canada as a payment service provider. In the United Kingdom, it has obtained a payment institution license from the Financial Conduct Authority (the ‘FCA’). In Ireland, it has obtained a payment institution license from the Central Bank of Ireland, and such license permits it to provide certain payment services across the EEA.
The company is subject to requirements, such as capital and safeguarding rules, consumer protection requirements, privacy and cybersecurity requirements (including those under the EU Digital Operational Resilience Act), outsourcing oversight requirements, requirements related to unclaimed property and escheatment, and periodic regulatory examinations.
The company is subject to laws, regulations, and disclosure requirements relating to consumer protection in the United States and other jurisdictions in which it has operations, where such laws, regulations, and supervisory guidance are enforced by numerous government agencies. In the United States, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (the ‘CFPB’) implements, examines compliance with, and enforces federal consumer financial laws governing financial products and services, including the Electronic Fund Transfer Act and its implementing regulation, Regulation E, which includes the Remittance Transfer Rule. The CFPB has substantial rule-making and enforcement authority to prevent UDAAP violations in connection with any transaction involving a consumer financial product or service. As a larger participant in the industry for international money transfers, the company is subject to direct CFPB supervisory authority over its business.
Intellectual Property
As of December 31, 2024, the company owned six U.S. registered trademarks, two pending U.S. trademark applications, 122 foreign registered trademarks, and 23 pending foreign trademark applications covering the mark REMITLY, its collapsed Clasped Hand logo, REMITLY (+ Clasped Hand logo), PASSBOOK BY REMITLY, Hui Mei Yi in Chinese characters, and Rui Mei Yi in Chinese characters. This includes six foreign registered trademarks for the REWIRE mark and REWIRE logo resulting from the purchase of Rewire (O.S.G.) Research and Development Ltd. (‘Rewire’). Additionally, it owns common law trademark rights in the above-referenced marks, as well as the REMITLY PROMISES DELIVERED (+ Clasped Hand logo) mark in the United States and certain other jurisdictions where common law rights are recognized. The company also owns several domain names, including www.remitly.com.
History
Remitly Global, Inc. was founded in 2011. The company was incorporated in the state of Delaware in 2011.