AirAsia’s BigPay Launches International Remittance Services

BigPay, the financial services venture by Malaysian low-cost carrier AirAsia, has announced the fixed-rate international remittance services across Southeast Asia.

BigPay is rolling out cross-border transfers for its users to Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines. Such transfers can be done using its mobile application, and will be charged at a fixed rate for each corridor at competitive exchange rates, with no hidden fees or charges, the firm said in a press release.

Technology can dramatically reduce the cost of remittance and we want to make it easy for people to move money abroad – whether it is sending money to family, friends or other overseas payments – without having to pay exorbitant exchange rates and transfer fees,» said CEO and co-founder Chris Davison.

Davidson added that financial inclusion is a cornerstone of BigPay, and offering low-cost and accessible money transfers is part of its strategy to address this.

BigPay was launched in 2018 by AirAsia as an e-wallet, hoping to leverage the low-cost carrier’s dominance in regional air travel in Southeast Asia. It promised to reduce the cost of air travel, including the cost of foreign transactions when traveling. A key differentiator is that it waives markups on foreign exchange, and other transactional fees charged by traditional debit and credit cards.

Operating on a challenger bank model, BigPay has also tied up with MasterCard, which provides users access to 35 million merchants globally, and will soon venture into offering loans.

BigPay has more than 750,000 users as of July 2019, and its transactional volume has been growing 20 percent month-on-month, which also said that BigPay plans to launch in Singapore by year-end.