Sending money to the Philippines is a bit tricky. As a recipient of foreign remittances (read: problogging salary) for a year now, I seek for the most reliable, efficient, safe and FAST service.

The thing is, with foreign remittances, the word fast is a very relative term, and funds to get credited to a Philippine bank account could take 2-5 banking days.

In problogging, your monthly earnings are mostly preferred to be transferred electronically, without going to the bank or writing a pile of checks. Everyone would want to be able to transfer money in a click of a button, in front of one’s computer screen.

Bank-to-bank transfers around the world is a bit pricey, and so is not practical (for blog networks) if the funds being sent is less than 500$ each in, say 50-100 bloggers, located globally, on a monthly basis. (Still the process of remitting isn’t as fast as I would like fast to be.)

Thus, paypal seems to be the favorite of most blog networks I work for, unfortunately the Philippines is not yet fully supported, and so to be able to send money to the Philippines using paypal funds, you would use something like Xoom to do the job (and some other sort-of “middleman” between e-money and a Philippine bank account). However, my personal experience with Xoom was really terrible. It worked only a few times and sucked most of the time. Besides, I hate that feeling of “having money” that kept bouncing over the cyberspace and not landing cold and crisp in the palm of my hands.

Moneybookers has been doing a swell job, though the time to credit a bank account after withdrawing funds seems to take longer as time passes by. It used to be just 2 banking days, now it stretches to 5. (So I imagine the same case, if not worse, when and if the Philippines gets fully supported by paypal.)

If there was one remittance service that I truly hate, it was Forex: because they do not deliver on their promised delivery timeline. Forex maybe a big name in balikbayan box deliveries, but it was (for me) awful with foreign remittances.

Anyway, (in this electronic age) I still do not understand why it takes two banks of two different countries some three days or more before successfully finishing a transaction when Western Union can do it in a few minutes from one point on the globe to another? And if you have a U.S. issued card, you can now even send money online via Western Union. Now, that’s what I would call consistently fast and efficient. :-P

So, guess which remittance method I love most these days? He he.

Oh, this wasn’t a sponsored post ;-)