How Big is the P2P Remittance Market?

The lure and the size of the P2P Remittance market are huge. How big is the remittance market? Some say it is in the Trillions. Some say a few Billions. What is the actual number?

Transcription:

Hello my name is Faisal Khan. I am a banking and a payment consultant.

And the question is how to start a money transfer series that I’m doing that I think we should address is how big is the P2P market, the person to person transfer market.

Well, statistically you can get this number from WorldBank.

Dilip Ratha is the chief knowledge economist at World Bank publishes the data. He is the oracle for all things remittances (as I’d like to call him) and he publishes this data which is received from all the central banks worldwide and amalgamate events of the migration data. And roughly today the whole market size for the international remittances is about 610 to 630 billion dollars. That is the approximate size that we have today.

There is an informal channel of which we don’t know how big it is. Some people say it is twice the original size of the official data. That means it’s more than a one trillion dollars. Some people say it’s equal to the size of the official data which is 600 billion and some people even cite half of it. The truth is there is no way to measure that because it is indeed undocumented its underground we don’t know how it works. And there is another area that we need to reconsider or consider is how the data that is now mostly put under the B2B could be remittances but it’s classified under B2B. So for example there are a lot of transactions that are happening from marketplaces to individuals. So for example Fiverr could be paying me. Is that considered a remittance? Strictly speaking no it’s not a remittance. Its not a person to person transfer or someone who’s working abroad. It’s me, my virtual shadow working in a marketplace and the marketplace is giving me my money that’s due to me. But such transactions in in countries like let’s in Pakistan and Bangladesh in Philippines are documented under the purview of Remittances. In many countries they are not. In India. They’re not documented under remittances to the best of my knowledge. If I’m incorrect on this please correct me.

I know in Tanzania they are not in Kenya they are not.

So you know there are certain countries that will document business to person payments as non remittances whilst in other cases they will. So we have to be careful of how we, what the definition is being used but generally speaking the market size SIX HUNDRED BILLION officially unofficially no one knows. And needless to say the P2P market is also sort of leaks in to the B2B Market.

That’s all for today. If you have any more questions or comments feel free to ask below and I’ll be happy to answer them. Till then, care.

This page was last updated on September 1, 2022.

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