Remittance as a Service (RaaS)

This page was last updated on 21 Feb 2021.

Remittance as a Service (RaaS)

Sponsored by:

Faisal Khan, LLC

Introduction

Remittance as a Service or RaaS was a term coined by Faisal Khan in the early 2011.

Just like Software as a Service (or SaaS), remittance-as-a-service refers to the whole money tranfer business offered as a payable monthly service.

Why is Remittance as a Service important?

If you are starting out setting up a company that would like to work in the money transfer space, then RaaS is extremely important for you to consider. Setting up a cross border payments company is no easy feat. The most challenging part, other than learning about the nuances of the business itself, are issues like:

All of the above costs money! Capital. Dollars. Money that is in limited supply. So how does Remittance-as-a-Service help?

The whole idea behind RaaS is to enable would be entrepreneurs, startups, and incumbents to be able to take advantage of this being offered as a service and not have to manage all of the tasks listed above.

Best of it is to think of it as a white-label service, or a ‘lease’ service. An even easier example if to look at GMail. You could setup your own mail server, and you would need to do a lot of the heavy lifting, get a physical hardware server, OS, e-mailing software, security, hardening, internet connection (redundant), IPs, networking gar, cooling, data center, personnel, routing, spam filtering services, fine tuning, etc. or just pay a few dollars a month, per mailbox and get this service from Google.

RaaS is no different. For a few dollars per month (relatively) speaking, you get all the services of a remittances company, available to you, under your brand.

To give you another analogy. Let’s assume you are in the US, and you want to start a taxi service. So, now you dediced you need a taxi in each state (one taxi = one money transmitter license. Having said this, which of the following three options would you choose?

  1. Build/assemble your own car from scratch and make it into a taxi?
  2. Go to a dealership and buy a car and use that as a taxi?
  3. Go to the dealership and lease a car and use that as a taxi?

Chances are you would opt for Option # 3. Well, congratulations, you’ve just choosen X-as-a-Service model.

Earlier I wrote a paper that compared, in the United States, the money transmitter license cost to that of money transmitter license lease.

© 2010-2021. All Rights Reserved. How To Start a Money Transfer Business is owned & operated by Faisal Khan, LLC. Web Hosting by Alpine Technologies. Social Media Marketing by Totem Publishing. For Media & Marketing Inquiries, please contact Cheddar Marketing.