The Expert Podcast

Financial technology or fintech is an area of industry that is creating almost daily new platforms and new methods of performing financial transactions. It could be money transfers, it can be insurance, it might be lending mortgages. The fact that technology and artificial intelligence is creating new capabilities at a rapidly increasing pace, it allows for work that used to be done by humans or that needed more expense to be shrunk down into much more efficient workflows work processes. One of those is money transfer.

This company SendSprint that had an executive moved over from another firm has introduced an international money transfer platform and they're starting with a five dollar flat fee. It's a pretty big deal usually it's a sliding scale based on value and you know to be fair this particular company has right now limited markets. This Sprint company fast simple hassle-free international money transfers has a flat fee. We're not associated with them, we don't get paid from them, this is just an observation of the types of technology systems that are coming out every day. We see news like this you know these two three times a week.

So if you have the need to do money transfers or wire transfers or get money from A to B, be aware that the technologies that you have used in the past may become outdated very quickly. Even things like Zelle or PayPal or Venmo have advantages but there are new platforms that come out regularly. Now it's a balance right, you want to make sure that any new technology that you use is legitimate, it's not a scam, they're not just taking your money. You want to know who's backing it, if you send over large amounts of money is the recipient really going to get it, something to investigate with these. Also what is the security footprint of these platforms, do they have protection against you losing your money.

As we talked about in other videos, one of the methods you can use when sending money through a new platform for the first time or to a new recipient is to send a small amount first as a test to make sure that it goes to the right place. And then if you have a bigger amount you want to send, you can verify that your recipient got it and then send the full amount afterwards. Many banking institutions used to do this, PayPal as a matter of fact when they first set up an account used to send you two or three small deposits - two cents, eight cents, 21 cents whatever it was - and you had to type those amounts in to your app before they verified your account. You could do the same thing as a sender to make sure that where you're sending your money is going to the right place and it's not lost in the internet somewhere.

But this is just the latest example, this Sprint money transfer, it's called SendSprint, that allows humans to send money through technology and artificial intelligent driven platforms. And the fact that these are all technology makes it a lot cheaper, a lot less friction in the system.