Remitting Money via Western Union

One of the fastest and reliable ways to remit your money to another country is via Western Union. It does not require any deposit account at the country that you plan to send the money to.

There is a lot of Western Union agents located at various locations in Singapore. I just remitted some money to Germany last week… It is quite simple, I went to the Singpost branch initially but the server down…...thus, at the end I approached the Western Union service at Maybank.

Not all the Maybank counter staff knows how to perform the transaction, hence I waited for about fifteen minutes for the relevant people. You need to fill in a form on the place that you plan to transfer, who is the receiver and how much money…then, they shall calculate the exchange rate and administrative fee…The exchange rate is relatively high…same as the bank published rate (usually worse than money changer rate).

I received a receipt. There was a MTCN number, you need to let your receiver know and your receiver shall be able to withdraw the cash with local currency at any local Western Union agent by showing the MTCN number and his Identification Card. The money is ready for withdrawal in less than one hour time. You can track your money online with the MTCN number as well.

I transferred Euro300 to Germany for a fee of SGD60. What I can conclude was that the fee is very high, more than 10%. Hence, if possible, uses other alternative, i.e. credit card advance cash withdrawal, ATM card (with MEPS or Cirrus), remit to account…all this are cheaper, if I am not wrong…(each has its pros and cons, though…)