Business News of Wednesday, 8 December 2021
Source: www.ghanaweb.com
2021-12-08
Transfers can take as little as ten minutes or less to reach the recipient
The word remittance is derived from remit, which means to send back. It is the amount of money sent to another person as a payment or as a gift.
Broadly speaking, any payment of an invoice or a bill can be called a remittance.
However, the term is often used to describe a sum of money sent by someone working abroad to his or her family back home.
The most common way of making a remittance is by using an electronic payment system through a bank or a money transfer service such as Western Union.
People who use these options are charged a fee. Transfers can take as little as ten minutes or less to reach the recipient.
According to the World Bank’s 2019 Migration and Development Brief, $529 billion in remittances were sent to low- and middle-income countries in 2018—an increase of 9.6% over the previous record high of $483 billion in 2017. This figure is significantly larger than the $344 billion of foreign direct investment in these countries, excluding China, in 2018. Including high-income countries, the total amount of remittances jumps to $689 billion, up from $633 billion in 2017.
In Ghana, money transfers have increased significantly in the last two years due to the outbreak of COVID-19 and the increase in the patronage of online services.