Paysera and Ria Team to Help Unbanked Consumers

Paysera has teamed with Ria Money Transfer to help unbanked customers send and receive money.

The partnership, announced Friday (March 10), lets clients send money to 522,000 Ria cash pickup locations around the world.

“Sometimes it’s not possible to transfer money to a bank account because the recipient doesn’t have a local bank account,” Gintautas Mezetis, CEO of Lithuania-based Paysera, said in a news release.

“For example, in Turkey, a country of 85 million people, 26% of the adult population does not have a bank account. This amounts to 17 million people. It is quite common not to have an account in other parts of the world.”

And even if the recipient has a bank account, Mezetis added, they might not have a debit card, or access to an ATM. In addition, international transfers are sometimes more expensive than cash pickups.

The company expects the transfer service will appeal to migrants working in Europe sending money home to their families, and to Ukrainian citizens fleeing the Russian invasion of their country and living in the EU.

“Remittances sent from relatives working in the EU to their loved ones can make up a significant part of the family budget, supporting their basic needs, such as health, food and education,” said Alla Shelest, Ria’s regional director of business development.

PYMNTS explored this phenomenon last year in a conversation with Jose Ivars-Lopez, Ria’s U.K. and Ireland country manager, who said that delays in these transactions can be crippling for people on the receiving end.

In countries like the U.K., where there is a large migrant population, he said demand for money transfer services spiked in the wake of the pandemic as people were able to save about 30% more of their income by working from home.

That large migrant population, combined with the wide range of different ethnicities and nationalities, continues to form an “an excellent combination” for a worldwide operation like Ria, Ivars-Lopez added.

“It’s very [basic] for one company to send money to a particular country, but when you are a global player like Ria and you can cover 155-plus countries and territories across the world, that’s a real value for our customers,” he told PYMNTS.

To foster customer stickiness and stay competitive in the busy remittance market, Ivars-Lopez added that Ria has digitized its processes and made it easy for customers to send funds in a relatively short amount of time. The company has also invested in nonbank payout locations such as independent outlets and small grocery stores and supermarkets around the world.