Correos offers money transfer service for Colombians in Spain
Colombian immigrants living in Spain can now send money back home through a new service on offer through Correos post offices. Correos launched a pilot phase of a new rapid international money order service this week that will help the 300,000 Colombians currently living in Spain to transfer money across the Atlantic to their families.
The new service stems from an agreement signed last year between Correos and postal operators in Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, the Dominican Republic and Uruguay.
The agreement was to set up a network, called CorreoGiros, for sending international money orders. Services are already in place for a number of Latin American countries.
For Colombia, the service will be offered through a pilot phase until staff across the postal network have been trained to use the CorreoGiros service. The pilot phase will be offered through 2,300 Correos post offices and in 16 offices in Colombia.
The service will allow citizens of all the signatory countries to transfer money quickly and safely, with payment to recipients made within 15 minutes, Correos said.
Even accounting for the costs from the designated postal operators, pricing for the new service would make it accessible to all customers, Correos pledged, adding that the service would offer “significant” savings compared to rates offered by large money transfer firms.
The CorreoGiros network is being established based on the International Financial System (IFS) designed by the Postal Technology Centre of the Universal Postal Union.
Work has been ongoing since 2007 to improve the electronic transfer of money between Spain, Portugal and Morocco as well as Chile, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Peru and Uruguay.
Correos said in a statement this week: “The implementation of IFS in these countries is proving a success and an example is the launch of the service with the Dominican Republic, which recorded an increase of 165% during the first month of service versus the number of drafts sent in all of 2010, or the case of Peru, where the number of transactions in the first week of the system matched the number previously seen in an entire month.”
