The Remittance market is booming in India, says Manish Misra, Head of Remittance products, ICICI Bank.

Manish Misra will be a key speaker at the Global Consumer Money Transfer conference on Monday 30th October at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Knightsbridge, London.

Mr. Misra who is flying into London specially for the event is buoyant about the remittance market in India.
About $5billion of remittances flowed into India in the last year through ICICI Bank. This is big leap from 2003 when just $1billion was sent in from overseas.

According to Mr. Misra this has been sparked by the bank creating new products after listening carefully to customers who found that earlier methods ofsending money had been cumbersome and expensive. Typically they would send money through wire transfers or cheques. Cheques took time to clear, sometimes running into weeks, while wire transfers were expensive often costing $30-$40 per transaction.

The bank then designed the ‘Money2India’ online remittance services which meant that the remittances could be achieved without having even to visit the local ICICI Bank branch. Time is on average five working days.

The sweetener is that the transaction is entirely free if the customer has a bank account. Is the bank being altruistic? In fact it relies on its profit by the margins on the exchange rate and a big jump in remittance volumes.

Says Mr. Misra:”Doing away with fees and transfer charges has worked. The remittances come in largely from the Gulf area and North America. The customer profile covers everyone from Indian taxi drivers in New York or Dubai to affluent software engineers and businessmen based in Canada or London.”

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