Lebara, WorldRemit Team Up For Mobile Payments-Based Money Transfer

WorldRemit has been busy lately, previously seen winning funding rounds, running international transfer, and teaming up with Wing to push into Cambodia. Now, it’s sent word our way about the latest push it’s made, teaming up with Lebara to serve as the company’s exclusive money transfer partner.

The new partnership allows the three million-plus Lebara users—both Lebara Mobile and Lebara Money—to put WorldRemit’s network to work quickly, and without a lot of hassle, directly from both the Lebara app and the website. Plus, WorldRemit also gets access to co-branding efforts in Lebara’s retail operations, as well as in the Lebara Mobile simpacks sold in stores.

Lebara Group’s CEO Graeme Oxby noted “Many of Lebara’s customers send money home to relatives and friends and we are delighted to be able to partner with WorldRemit to offer a simple to use and highly cost effective service. Lebara mobile’s leadership position in the growing international residents market in Europe, coupled with a surge in smartphone users, creates an ideal platform for launching new and exciting services through partnerships. Our partners get unique access to a customer base which few other mobile companies can match.”

That gives WorldRemit a lot of extra range, and brings it that much closer to its current goal of offering up access to 10 million customers in emerging markets by 2020. Even if it were nowhere on the way to that goal before—and we know that’s not so thanks to the Wing connection—it’d be well on the way now. WorldRemit already handles, at last report, 74 percent of international money transfers to mobile accounts worldwide, so maintaining its primacy is that much easier.

Though given that Lebara seems to focus on large parts of Western Europe—including Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK—it’s not immediately clear that this would give WorldRemit access to emerging markets. Still, it’s a big new slug of business, and in mobile payments, most markets are still technically emerging.

In the end, both sides advance here; Lebara gets to offer new services to its customers and WorldRemit gets to offer up those services to a big new slug of customers. Whether or not WorldRemit gets access to emerging markets isn’t clear, but it gets access to markets, and improved cash flow is improved cash flow.