TransferGuru

Market

Target market

The target market for TransferGuru can be defined in three categories:

1) The first typical user regularly supports family, extended family, or friends in their home country through financial gifts. This is often referred to as remittance. The users in this group often have strong cultural links to home and their local diaspora community; they rely heavily on word of mouth to build trust, and are likely to face higher remittance fees due to their reliance on older and non-digital money transfer operators. Once made aware to cheaper options through our platform, this group exhibits a propensity to repeatedly use the comparison service.

2) The second group are also often economically active in more than one country and so have a variety of currency needs. They also typically make small frequent transfers. Younger and sometimes in higher-skilled jobs, their needs could include paying back student loans, paying back a mortgage or meeting other commitments, or simply investing/saving in their home country account. These users are better integrated with the culture of the country in which they work and more digitally savvy. This makes it easier to access them through mainstream channels including digital advertising.

3) The third typical user does not make regular payments abroad, unlike the previous two categories. They make one-off transfers of large amounts of money, for example for buying or selling property, to move their pension deposits, or large investments. We feature a range of FX brokers who handle large sum transfers to cater to this category.

We have market-tested six different corridors (UK to India, USA, Nigeria, Poland, Pakistan, and France). With the new iteration of the website and the move to a .com domain we are expanding our marketing strategy to target 50 receiving countries. Multi-lingual iterations of the site will expand upon this, to include the US, UAE and China as sending countries as well.

Characteristics of target market

The market for remittances is worth over $600bn, growing at an average rate of 9% per year. Digital remittances form 6% of the global market.

In 2015, remittance service providers generated more than $40bn in revenue. Digital providers are increasing market share and putting pressure on the whole market to lower prices, with a new focus on efficient fraud prevention, customer service, and user-friendly products. Traditional operators have responded by lowering fees to compete, and beginning online ventures - e.g. Western Union’s digital share of total revenue has doubled in the last two years. But providers face criticism for complicated fee structures and high margins, despite the entry of cheaper competitors.

With no way of assessing providers, most customers are unaware of the range of choice they have. Four in five regular remitters think their current choice of provider is either too expensive or too slow. Two in three do not know a cheaper option than the one they use exists.

Marketing strategy

Our marketing strategy relies on content, demographically specific outreach, and tailored advertising to gain traction, convert users, and build a reputation of trustworthiness.

In terms of content, we deploy blogs, videos, animations, and infographics to build trust and awareness, encourage transparency, and equip users with educational tools to help them make better choices. As well as small-scale news items, we address macro-narratives of personal information control, social justice and democratising financial expertise. This strategy helps build a long standing relationship with our users. The host of written and multimedia content we have produced so far focuses on UK-outbound remitters, and we will expand into remaining corridors. We will also continue our research and publish our insights into the remittance industry. We are also working on a number of widgets, browser extensions and interactive elements, to increase access to our tools and content. Meanwhile, we are expanding access to the team as a whole, with a range of interviews, video content and blog feeds. This will allow us to provide the company with a human face and a common point of feedback from users, but also set the agenda on industry issues in the media like personal finance and gender in tech.

Demographic outreach relies on a solid understanding of our diverse users. While many can be accessed via mainstream advertising channels, we will also deploy strategic partnerships with complementing services to leverage new audiences. This is particularly important for users who are less well integrated with their resident community.

Advertising on search engines and social media, as well as SEO, have been at the forefront of our strategy since the site’s launch in order to gain rapid traction. Having established a digital user base, we will gain non-digital users through community-specific printed publications, diaspora radio stations and cultural society events.

Competition strategy

We aim to succeed against potential competitors in five ways:

1) To our knowledge there is no remittance comparer that provides live and comprehensive data. This is vital as the market is dynamic: at any given time, different service providers are cheaper in different corridors and for different transfer values. No transfer provider is consistently best, therefore real-time search platforms are crucial. As far as we know one currently does not exist - our closest competitors feature only a fraction of the providers and corridors as our technology facilitates. Following this fundraising round we will aim to establish ourselves as market leaders in the current market.

2) Within the next year we aim to integrate the 94% of the remittance market that remains non-digital, by building an app that allows remitters to search for cash transfer agents based on location data. This would make us one of the few platforms to integrate digital and nondigital options.

3) TransferGuru is impartial towards providers (e.g. providers cannot pay to feature at the top of our comparisons), building our reputation as a credible source of information to consumers. Growing our user base and customer retention relies heavily on building trust. We believe this impartiality, alongside our integration of user reviews incorporating three metrics will make us a voice of authority in this industry. Doing so will place us ahead of later challengers.

4) Our home in London places us within a vibrant multi-national community. We are located close to a host of rapidly expanding digital money transfer operators, allowing us to grow with our partners, build long lasting relationships with future market leaders, and influence the development of tracking systems and analytics.

5) Such a rapidly growing market will no doubt attract the attention of generic comparison sites. But building a comprehensive money transfer comparison application is a technically challenging task. Our system relies on heavy data aggregation methodology - a field we have strong expertise in.