Remitee - Digital cross-border payments platform

One of the most important and controversial political and economical matters in today’s world is migration taking place worldwide, and the several difficulties and challenges associated with this process. The reasons why people decide to migrate from their origin countries into a different one are vast and complex. Some of the most popular issues that are forcing this phenomenon are absence of labor and employment opportunities in their countries of origin, faulty public health and educational services, macroeconomics conflicts taking place such as wars and violent events, among many others.

According to the World Bank, the global average cost in Q3 2023 of sending $200 USD was of 6.18%, and remains still distant from the G20 commitment of reducing the global average to 5%, as well as the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target of 3%. 

 Remitee has identified the lack of an efficient and affordable money transfer service in many underserved countries in Latin America. Currently, the process of sending international money transfers can take up to five days due to several factors such as fraud prevention, erroneous payment details, holidays and weekends, different currencies, different time zones,the place where you’re sending or receiving funds, among others. These factors that delay international money transfers are crucial and impact the lives of migrants, as remittances are generally highly time sensitive.  

Remitee is founded with a clear purpose: facilitate the lives of millions of migrants. Since its inception, it has focused on connecting families across the globe by offering adequate tools and facilitating cross-border payments with its platform.

Remitee was born as a C2C platform in Argentina and Chile where expats (most of them not banked) could easily send money to their families and friends, and as a services payments platform. After a successful positioning in the C2C segment, Remitee decided to expand their model by partnering with banks, financial and remittance institutions, among others, to achieve a greater reach in the United States, Latin America, Europe, and other countries.

Remitee currently has three business models: B2B2C,C2C, and SaaS. In the B2B2C model, Remitee partners with banks, financial, and remittance institutions that already have their Application Programming Interface  based on different technologies, and Remitee made the integration efforts with every partner to connect their API with Remitee’s API to be able to send payment orders in the different currencies and payment methods available, allowing customers of these different institutions to send payments to their families and friends. For each of these integrations, Remitee executes the proper commercial agreements, Due Diligence and technological integration processes to ensure a smooth integration.

As collateral to optimize its own operation, Remitee developed a payment network with great capillarity. Remitee currently has fiat payment capabilities in Latin America, the United States, Mexico, Europe and other countries.

Remitee works with its partners with three different schemes:

• Pre-paid, where the partner transfers Remitee fiat money and accredits it.  

•  Post-paid, where Remitee frequently claims the cancellation of the generated debt.
• On-demand liquidity, where each transaction comes with money attached.

The C2C model currently operates in Argentina and Chile, with capabilities of sending money to countries in Latin America, the United States, Europe, and Africa. Capital flows under this business model are simpler, as the payer sends Remitee the total transferred amount, and Remitee sends it to the receiver’s institution. 

The SaaS is Remitee's recently introduced business model, a white-label app where Remitee is aiming to partner with other players of the industry, instead of competing with them. The SaaS works as a "plug and play" solution that will enable players from different verticals to perform money transfers and direct payments, leveraging from Remitee's API as well as Remitee's Legal & Regulatory services. Companies such as MTOs that do not have the technological and/or legal & regulatory capabilities, Retailers with big payrolls and employees in need of an app where they can perform their payments, E-Wallets without legal & regulatory capabilities, and banks who will not invest a large amount of Capex into a software that is not part their core, are partners that will leverage from a solution like this, integrating all of these services in an app. Currently, there are no players positioned as a one-stop shop for cross-border payments into Latin America, and that is the role that Remitee seeks to play.

Remitee is a multi-purpose cross-border payment platform that helps millions of Latin-Americans send money to be collected in cash, e-wallet or bank account within minutes, as well as perform direct payments of different services such as utility bills, pre-paid mobile phones or branded gift cards, among others.

According to the IADB, during 2022 and 2023, flows of remittances received by Latin American countries continued to grow at rates of 10.7% and 9.5% respectively, similar to the rates that had been observed before the COVID-19 pandemic, thus consolidating the trend observed up to 2018 and 2019. The growth of remittances in 2023 is produced above all by the growth of remittances received by the Central American countries (13.2%), in particular Nicaragua, by the growth of the remittances that Mexico received (9.8%), and the growth in remittances to South America (7.9%), especially to Argentina and Paraguay. In the case of Caribbean countries, growth was more moderate (2.6%), driven mostly by the remittances received by Trinidad and Tobago.

Latin America and the Caribbean are geographies that are currently experiencing pronounced alterations in migration patterns. According to the Inter-American Development Bank, Venezuela’s current political and economical situation has produced the second largest displacement of people after Syria, and is receiving less international attention and resources. Simultaneously, there is an increasing population in Haiti that is migrating to South American countries, notably to Argentina and Chile, Central American multitudes migrating into Mexico and the United States, and Nicaraguans migrating into Costa Rica. 

Remitee has been closely monitoring the remittance industry in Latin America and its patterns and trends throughout the years, so they can focus on countries where Remitee's solution is imperative. As a result of this, commercial relationships are being established in key countries where impact can be even bigger. Currently, Central America has been a region that has been overseen by the industry and Remitee has already developed a Commercial Plan to develop partnerships with key players in these countries to drive meaningful impact.

Remitee is the first startup offering digital transfers with all these alternatives from a mobile App for more than 12 million underserved people, most of them unbanked. Remitee is conscious that migration is a natural phenomenon that will follow an increasing trend in the future, and its solution aims to reduce and eliminate the several challenges that migrants face, making it easier and more accessible for them to send money to their families and loved ones. With many of the company’s employees and founders having a migrant background, Remitee knows that migration can be a troubling and difficult experience, as well as the importance of providing people the necessary means to conduct a decent life quality.  By partnering with financial institutions to a greater degree, as well as heavily investing in its B2C platform, Remitee is facilitating the lives of these migrants by enabling them to provide their families with the means to purchase basic food basket products, clothing, as well as other expenditures. 

Remitee is a digital platform created by migrants for migrants who have faced challenging situations in their countries of origin, such as leaving families behind, escaping economic and political turmoil, violent regimes, among other. 

Many of Remitee's unbanked clients have found a solution in its B2C model, where they can easily carry out a transfer. Some of these clients have expressed ways in which the app could be improved, such as a more intuitive interphase, and lower rejection rates in their transactions, as some clients have experienced some difficulties. As a response to this, Remitee assembled a new B2C Development team, and in collaboration with the technological team, developed a Beta app that has already been launched so that sending money to their families becomes even easier. In the following months, the new app will be launched with an improved UX/UI were transactions are processed even faster, and the rejection rate will be closer to 0%. At the same time, the Client Support Team will be increased so that the user experience is improved. Testimonies of current clients, which can be found at the company's webpage, show a general satisfaction, and are taken into consideration to ensure a better product.

Being born in immigrant families, Remitee’s founders have always seen first-hand, and are aware of the difficulties of sending and receiving money to and from their families. This has allowed Remitee's founders to have a broader perspective of the current challenges in the industry.

Sergio Saravia, CEO and co-founder of Remitee, was born in Argentina to humble and hard-working Bolivian parents. After working for more than 12 years in Western Union, Sergio discovered how vaguely the money transfer industry had evolved, consequently identifying a major market need for many Latin Americans. Since funding Remitee, Sergio has focused on shifting the way payments are made worldwide to make remittances more accessible and affordable to all.

Nicolas Zamudio, CFO and co-founder was born in Argentina, grandson to Spanish grandparents who migrated from Spain when they were only 20 years old and with the exact amount of $5 USD. He was raised in a hard-working environment, where he learned that financial inclusion and education are the best ways to create a fair, equitable, and transparent financial system.

As a means to impact the lives of more migrants, Remitee has identified key countries where they intend to a bigger participation, both in the sending and receiving side, and is currently developing commercial relationships in different countries with different pay-in and pay-out partners, so that users from these countries can benefit from Remitee's platform. On the sending side, Remitee has identified Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, and Peru as key countries to bring their technological solution to more people. On the receiving side, all of the South American countries, as well as the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, and Paraguay have been classified as fundamental in order to carry out its mission of making the lives of migrants easier.   

Remitee's B2B model has proven to be scalable, successful and essential in helping thousands of migrants send money to their families, thus improving their lives. During 2023, Remitee worked with more than 30 Money Transfer Operators, Banks, E-Wallets and Retailers, and more than 270,000 senders were benefitted from Remitee's cutting-edge technology, enabling them to send money to their families to facilitate the lives of more than 360,000 beneficiaries. 

During the first quarter of 2024, Remitee has helped more than 195,000 migrant senders, a growth of 5.2x compared to the first quarter of 2023, and totaling more than 260,000 beneficiaries, 4.8x more compared to Q1 2023. 

In the beginning of 2024, Remitee has introduced a new business model, its SaaS white label, where Remitee aims to partner with other important players in the industry to make remittances for migrants more accessible and affordable. Remitee currently is operating with a South American retailer as is holding talks with another partner for an integration in the following months.

With its three business models combined, Remitee is convinced that its mission of positively impacting the lives of migrants providing an easy, fast, and secure way of carrying out cross-border payments, is being successfully executed and will continue to grow exponentially in the following years.

Remitee is cognizant of MIT and Solve’s constant monetary and human capital investment in the entrepreneurial ecosystem.  As a company in the scaling stage, Remitee is conscious of the diverse benefits of being part of the Solve community.

Remitee’s Commercial Team efforts are mainly focused on attaining new partnerships with banks, financial, and remittance institutions, thus carrying out the company’s mission of helping more and more migrants worldwide. The company strongly believes that working next to Solve’s community will enable Remitee to develop fundamental relationships with key potential partners, as well as mentorship from its members that will add value to Remitee’s team in order to execute the company’s commercial plan. 

The company is convinced that partnering with Solve will enable Remitee to reach out to the top talent in the technology area who will support the company in the current project of the Implementation of Blockchain, as well as future technological projects that the company has already identified and will develop in the near future.

The company is currently raising its Series A round of approximately $10-$15 million in order to secure capital to fund its operations for 2024 and 2025 and execute its Business Plan to accelerate its growth to help more underserved migrants in Latin America, USA, and Europe. By joining Solve’s community, Remitee believes it will benefit from the community’s professional network to have a more complete preparation towards this process by having one-on-one meetings with high-value entrepreneurs, as well as the identification of potential top investors to present to them Remitee’s Business Plan and have the opportunity of investing in it, if they see fit.

Ever since its inception, Remitee has revolutionized the way remittances are made, from end to end. Remitee was born as a solution to a large, underserved, and mainly unbanked population, making remittances more affordable and accessible, simpler, faster and more secure.

As Remitee’s business model evolved and immersed itself into the B2B2C segment, the company began working with some of the most important and reputable players in the industry. Remitee has had an essential role in the processing of transactions of some of the biggest players in the market, with a sharp technology that has eliminated bureaucratic processes that slow international transfers.

Remitee has a broad customer support team that brings support and assistance at any stage of the process, which has allowed it to keep a significantly low rejection rate. Remitee’s technology has proven to be innovative, functional, and highly scalable, and the current partnerships it holds with several large players in the industry validate this. One of Remitee’s first and biggest partners has declared its amusement with the company’s capabilities to deliver an outstanding product that has a daily impact on millions of migrants.

In addition to its already proven B2B model, Remitee recently launched a SaaS white-label app, where they saw an opportunity in collaborating with different companies such as Money Transfer Operators, Retailers, E-Wallets, and Banks by offering them a customizable Plug & Play software solution. Remitee believes that think a fully verticalized software platform that enables all types of cross border payments, fully integrated with the payout alternatives, plus the functionality needed to operate a business, is a solution that suits a vast majority of the industry needs, including those of who are currently locked into a branded remittance network. For the great majority of companies, expanding the range of countries, payout channels and services is nearly impossible. This requires heavy Capex, investment in software, user interphases, and personnel. For the bigger players, the hassle of developing the deals and infrastructure for a product out-of-the-core is unlikely to happen. These players will look for partners that can provide a “one stop shop” solution in specific verticals, that works to their high standards. The company believes that a fully verticalized software platform that enables all types of cross border payments, fully integrated with the payout alternatives, plus the functionality needed to operate a business, is a solution that suits a vast majority of the industry needs, including those of who are currently locked into a branded remittance network. 

Another project that will add value to the company with a important degree of innovation is the implementation of Blockchain technology in every transaction to eliminate the need for conciliations between businesses. Given the public nature of the Blockchain records and the possibility to implement smart contracts to execute the transactions, all the parties involved in the remittance process can monitor and directly allow or disallow the transactions. 

According to the World Bank, there are currently more than 41 million Latin American living outside of their countries of origin. A good proportion corresponds to economic migrants in search for better job opportunities in other countries. Nevertheless, in some other cases, there are migrants who are forced to move out of their countries due to economic and political turmoil, as is the case of millions of Haitians, Venezuelans, and other South and Central Americans escaping uncertain regimes. 

All of these migrants are in need of a technological platform that enables them to send money to their families to be used on primarily on food, education, and medical expenses. However, users are constantly faced with different issues associated with the solutions traditional players in the industry offer. Some of these issues include high costs due to the number of intermediaries involved, which is a key factor that migrants take into consideration when choosing a service provider. Another important obstacle users face is the time that remittances take to be processed, with an average of 2 to 5 days. 

Since its foundation, Remitee aimed at these issues to provide a solution that would satisfy the needs of migrants, offering a highly cost-competitive, fast, and secure solution. Every month, more and more migrants are trusting Remitee's cutting-edge technology, and is reflected on the amount of senders and receivers that are using its platform, as well as the total volume being processed by Remitee. On March 2024, Remitee was able to process $34 million in family support, 4.9x more than in March 2023 ($7 million). 

The company has the clear mission of sustaining this important growth rate throughout the next five years, leading to a successful IPO of the company in 2028. Remitee's goal is to generate an annualized GTV of $8 billion by 2028, as well as a $375 million of revenue. With these metrics, Remitee plans to support more than 15 million migrants throughout 2028.

Some of the indicators Remitee is using in order to measure its progress toward its goals are the total amount of transactions, total partnerships in its B2B2C platform, total clients that are being positively impacted by its C2C platform, as well as its GTV.

 Remitee has a broad technology team that is recurrently measuring these indicators to have a better understanding of Remitee's highs and lows, areas of improvement, among others.

 With these indicators in mind, Remitee aims at its impact goal of promoting sustained, inclusive, and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all, as well as providing a fair, equitable, and advanced platform for all, including a large underserved population across the globe. Remitee is a platform and application for the people, with the sole purpose of impacting the lives of millions of migrants through a more inclusive and accessible platform.

Remitee is a distributed system based on microservices, having a service bus as a backbone that allows the interaction of services with low maintenance.

Each service can be scaled separately, and in order to provide a unified interface to client applications, they are aggregated using API gateways.

The integration with a new paid network does not require major changes in the platform, just the creation of a service that acts as a middleware between Remitee and the destination network, and that it subscribes to the event bus, processes the messages routed to that network, and emits the standard response events to the Remitee platform.

Regarding transaction processing capabilities, Remitee can process its own payment orders as well as those of partners which are integrated through a proprietary API (from Remitee) or through Ripple (XCurrent).

 These microservices are developed in netcore and in the case of exposing an API they force authentication/authorization through Oauth2.There are some machine learning services that are developed in Python. The web interfaces of the operations team are developed in Angular 7 with Material Design.

As for the application, it is developed in React Native.

 In addition to this, Remitee is currently implementing Blockchain technology in every transaction to eliminate the need for conciliations between businesses.

Currently, there are 60 members in the organization, all of them full-time employees. 22 members in the Administrative area, 8 in the Commercial area, 25 in the Technological area, and 5 outsourced employees that are working along the technological team.

Remitee was founded in 2017 by two Argentinian and a Chilean entrepreneurs but the idea of a digital platform that would transform the lives of millions of migrants emerged two years back, when Sergio Saravia and Eduardo Hamel were attending the MIT Sloan School of Management.

After working for more than 12 years in Western Union, Sergio discovered how vaguely the money transfer industry had evolved, consequently identifying a major market need for many Latin Americans.

Consequently, both Sergio and Eduardo attended the Sloan School of Management, where they flourished their idea before officially launching Remitee in 2017.

Throughout 2023, Remitee assembled a Culture Team, a volunteer team composed of members of the organization, where each member was able to provide their insights regarding what should be Remitee's core values that must be put into practice every day, in order to reassure a safe and respectful environment, where any member's ideas and opinions are equal and listened, and an environment of growth and health is promoted.

The following values now form part of Remitee's everyday: 

- Integrity and transparency: each member inspires through action, committing to their promises and communicating with honesty
- Respect and empathy: Remitee embraces diversity, listening and connecting by valuing perspectives. Achievements and efforts are widely recognized through different media used by the company
- Teamwork: Synergy that arises from effort and collaboration is highly valuable in the company, thus generating authentic links, providing opportunities to everyone and sharing responsibilities
- Simplicity: everyone focuses on the essential, by simplifying the complex, constructing effective solutions. A simple and accessible communication is promoted 
- Excellence: everyone acts with discipline and perseverance, taking care of each member's physical and mental health. Everyone lives with passion and purpose in each of their actions.    

Remitee is aware that diversity in the workplace often leads to more creative ideas that are extremely valuable in problem-solving scenarios, and that it can offer a better understanding of its customers. Remitee is convinced that providing an equal, diverse, and inclusive workplace and environment brings out the best of each employee, as employees often find themselves more motivated working under a free and proper environment, where each one is an equal and its voice and opinion are highly valuable. As an example of this, at any work meeting in the company, anyone is free to give their opinion, no matter what their role is, as getting to know all the members’ perspectives adds great value to the company.

At the end of every year, a pulse survey is conducted, so that every member of the organization can provide feedback regarding their views on their roles, team, leadership, opportunities, health, recognition, communication, identity, so that low scores can be addressed in order to improve their experience in the company. Simultaneously, it should be highlighted that 67% of the members of the organization stated that they are happy in the company and wish to stay 3 or more years, while 19% stated that they wish to stay between 1-2 more years. This demonstrates that all of the actions that are being done in order to promote a great culture within company are being successful, and the company aims to increase this indicator in 2024.

Remitee’s members come from different backgrounds and ethnicities, some of them being migrants themselves. The company understands that performing in this industry, practicing these core values is essential to better understand its customer’s needs and thus feel more motivated to improve their lives. Remitee values, embraces, and reinforces diversity, equity, and inclusivity in its workplace.

Today, Remitee’s revenue model is composed of three pillars: a fixed fee that the sender is charged, the FX spread from each transaction, and a rebate that the services company pays Remitee for each transaction.

Remitee’s C2C platform is designed for migrants who provide or seek financial support to/from their families and friends, most of them unbanked and underserved. As the rate of digital banking penetration in Latin America remains low with respect to other geographies such as North America and Europe, this platform offers the facilities and technologies to assist this marginalized population. Migrants who live in Argentina and Chile use Remitee’s platform to send financial support to their families across many countries in the world by submitting the receiver’s banking information and receive the money in minutes. The sending fee is $1 USD on average. Currently operating in Argentina and Chile, Remitee is planning to expand its operations to other countries where it has a legal entity or is in process of obtaining it, such as the United States, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru.

The services payments model is intended to help migrants perform direct payments of different basic services such as utility bills, pre-paid mobile phones, branded gift cards, among others. Remitee holds partnerships with different service providers companies so unbanked migrants can have an easy and user friendly tool to pay for their services. In this model, the services provider company pays a rebate to Remitee that is between the 5%-10% range.

Remitee’s B2B2C model is the company’s most important and used platform to help improve the lives of millions of migrants, which offers the possibility of offering Remitee’s cutting-edge technology services to a greater degree. This highly scalable and functional model has proven to be successful, and the several partnerships that Remitee holds with many of the most reputable financial institutions of the world confirm it. Remitee realizes commercial and technological efforts to add strategic partners to its network, and some of these partners include many of the United States and Latin America’s biggest and most reputable commercial banks, financial institutions, remittances companies, among others. Under this model, Remitee has two different types of partners: inbound and outbound partners. Inbound partners are the sender’s financial institutions that send Remitee the total amount to be transferred, and sequentially Remitee transfers this money to the outbound partner who processes it and makes the last-mile delivery to the receiver.

Remitee's third business model is its SaaS white-label, where the company is providing to other players a "one-stop shop" solution in specific verticals, that works to their high standards. It is a fully verticalized software platform that enables all types of cross border payments, fully integrated with the payout alternatives, plus the functionality needed to operate a business, a solution that suits a vast majority of the industry needs, including those of who are currently locked into a branded remittance network.

Since its foundation in 2017, Remitee has had very clear the path that it has to follow in order to impact the lives of millions of migrants and at the same time become financially sustainable, in order to keep strengthening its products and services.

Remitee knows that to achieve financial sustainability and profitability, it is essential to bring in money to the company through different schemes, such as capital coming from Friends and Family, donations and grants from different institutions, as well as from capital from institutional investors. 

With the total amount of money that Remitee has received, it has invested an important proportion in the strengthening of the team, for the purpose of improving its products and services it offers to its clients, and to develop different strategic and technological projects that will add great value and will allow the company to grow its Gross Transaction Value (GTV) and Revenue. Currently, Remitee is in the process of executing a Commercial Plan that will grow its GTV 50x by the end of 2023, having started this Plan in June 2022. To successfully execute this Plan, Remitee has designed and is implementing the actions and measures it must take week-to-week so it can carry out the integration processes with several partners such as banks, financial institutions, remittance companies, among others.

 Additionally, with the team investment, the company is identifying different capital streams that will foster rapid growth. On one hand, the company is already planning its next round of investment capital between 2023-2024 and is monitoring different competitions in which will showcase its different technological projects to win donations and grants.

 With this Commercial Plan successfully executed, as well as other value-adding projects, Remitee is expected to achieve profitability by the beginning of 2025.