PayPal’s international money transfer service, Xoom, has announced that people in the United States, Canada and the U.K., as well as 31 other markets in Europe, can send money directly into bank accounts in South Korea.
Xoom, in a release, said that money sent from the app to Woori bank, Kookmin Bank and Shinhan Bank can be retrieved in minutes. The worldwide remittance market was worth $689 billion in 2018, the release noted, and South Koreans in other countries accounted for $6.2 billion of that.
There are an estimated 1.4 million Koreans in the United States alone, and many of them send money back to their home country.
“At Xoom, we are constantly innovating to provide the best possible money transfer service to families spread across the globe. We are delighted to offer South Korean foreign residents all the benefits of our service — speed, convenience and competitive rates. When they use Xoom, they no longer have to wait in line, fill out forms or pay higher fees to send money back home,” said Xoom Vice President and General Manager Julian King.
“South Koreans who’ve moved abroad have wanted more convenient and affordable ways to support their families back home. We are excited to partner with PayPal to offer their innovative global remittance service Xoom to South Koreans living in Canada, Europe and the U.S.,” said PayGate General Manager Mountie Lee.
Xoom is available in more than 160 countries around the world.
Xoom was launched in the U.K earlier this year, and King said at the time that the expansion was a logical progression.
“Overall, PayPal’s Xoom business — and PayPal itself — has seen a long-term secular trend in the digitization and now mobilization of the management and movement of money. In the specific case of the Xoom services, we saw that it was a market segment that was materially underserved, for whom there had not been appropriate, meaningful innovation.”