Behavioral Analytics Can Foster Consumer Satisfaction In the Cross-Border Remittance Market

Sending money abroad has become an essential part of migrant workers’ lives, leading to a boom in remittance service providers who help customers send billions annually to people in low- and middle-income countries.

Since recipients often depend on these funds for necessary living expenses like groceries or housing, any delay in the transaction process could be potentially crippling.

As a result, it is important for digital remittance services to provide a quick, safe and seamless customer experience to gain users’ trust and satisfaction, as well as remain competitive in the booming trillion-dollar cross-border remittance market.

Learn more: The Digital Currency Shift: The Cross-Border Remittances Report

To do this, platforms must first successfully differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate customers to be able to prevent the latter from gaining entry, Matt Oppenheimer, co-founder and CEO of remittance and payments service Remitly, told PYMNTS.

Founded in 2011, Remitly offers its services to consumers across Asia, Africa and Latin America, allowing immigrants to transfer funds digitally from 17 sending countries to more than 100 receiving countries.

Read the report: Monetizing Digital Intent Tracker®: Using Behavior-As-A-Service To Drive Top-Line Growth

Speaking in an interview that was featured in a recent PYMNTS report, Oppenheimer said that technologies such as behavioral analytics can help meet this goal, creating trusted and engaging customer relationships while also giving customers the peace of mind they need to move their money safely.

“I think that there is a theme within money transmission — and specifically international money transmission — that there is a lot more complexity [to it] than meets the eye,” he explained, adding that Remitly uses behavioral analytics “to delineate between who are good customers and who are bad actors trying to use our platform.”

According to the report, firms can collect and log customers’ personal data via behavioral analytics. Firms can then use that information to create a more personalized experience for the customer while also boosting satisfaction and possibly conversion, and ensuring the identities of customers are accurate.

See also: Remitly Taps Immigrant Market With New Passbook Banking Service

“[There are] countless pieces of behavioral analytic data that we are using to make sure that, ultimately, … customers, especially new customers that we might not know as well, are able to get through our transaction flow, including funds being [disbursed] all the way from going to our app for the first time, to entering in their information to their payment profile, giving us funds and then having those funds delivered,” Oppenheimer said.

This ultimately builds trust, he added, which is an essential factor in the remittance world — especially since immigrants living abroad are often more wary of sharing too much of their personal information online.

That wariness is heightened “the minute that you have a systematic issue around reviews” or unexpected post-transaction messages announcing a delay in the transfer, he explained further. Asking consumers to complete manual identity checks or reviews can also hurt customers’ views of the company as a trusted intermediary.

You might also like: Inside Remitly: Five Things to Know About the Newly Listed Money Transfer FinTech

Behavioral analytics can help companies to circumvent these frictions, enabling platforms such as Remitly to develop robust digital profiles of their users to better determine their legitimacy without the need for manual identity verification.

This capability became even more critical to enable swift remittances during the pandemic, as many consumers have increased the frequency with which they are sending funds overseas.

However, while behavioral analytics can provide key benefits for consumers and for trusted platforms such as Remitly, it is critical for remittance companies and other services to ensure that data privacy preferences and needs are considered.

“I think it’s really important that organizations focus on data privacy — customers expect that, we expect that,” Oppenheimer said. “It goes back to building that trusted brand and peace of mind with customers.”