Moneytis Aims To Bring Expedia Like Ease To Money Transfers

Moneytis, the FinTech startup, has created a platform to help consumers find the cheapest foreign exchange services and send money seamlessly, taking a page from travel aggregator websites like Booking.com and Expedia.

According to a news report in TechCrunch, Moneytis’ platform is straightforward, making it less complex for consumers. “I was an expat in China, and Etienne [Tatur] was in Europe. And I was shocked by hidden fees every time I wanted to send money,” Co-Founder and CFO Christophe Lassuyt said in an interview with TechCrunch. “That’s when we listed and compared all solutions out there. Friends quickly asked us to see the list. We ended up launching a comparison tool. We then understood that users wanted to compare, but also transfer easily. That’s the service we’re launching.”

The travel aggregator platform for currency, Moneytis compares all the services out there — such as TransferWise, MoneyGram and traditional banks like Western Union — and shows customers the fastest service, the cheapest one and the one that is most popular, among other criterias. With the platform, customers don’t have to be clients of the others services and can send money right to Moneytis without having to pay an extra fee, noted the report.

The way the startup makes money is by taking a small cut from the third-party services for which it generates leads for the foreign exchange services. Clients on average are sending $2,000, with Moneytis taking 0.3 percent.

TechCrunch noted that Moneytis is a volume play in that it will need thousands of transfers per day to grow. Another option is to build an API to enable large customers to automate transfers by always choosing the cheapest service available.

The market is currently fragmented, with no one company — TransferWise, MoneyGram, Western Union and others — emerging as a leader. There are also exchange rate volatilities, which makes one service cheaper one day and another the next. What’s more, some services are more efficient at handling wire transfers for certain routes better than others.