In cross-border payments, user loyalty comes down to a single principle: helping families keep more of the money they worked hard to earn.
For Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs), traditional remittance fees and slow transfer times add severe layers of friction to an already challenging life abroad.
BCRemit was founded with a mission to provide fast, secure, and affordable remittance for the global Filipino diaspora, ensuring that sending money is the seamless part of their journey. Achieving this mission, however, required actively bypassing the legacy bottlenecks of the traditional financial sector.
Overcoming the Limitations of Traditional Finance
Historically, sending money to the Philippines meant navigating rigid correspondent banking networks with average transfer times of 3 to 5 business days—a timeline that stretched even longer during weekends and holiday closures. Maintaining a real-time experience for users forced BCRemit’s internal operations to rely on manual liquidity forecasting and pre-funding massive amounts of working capital just to cover the settlement gap.
Beyond operational friction, legacy channels hit migrant workers with severe financial penalties. Traditional corridors regularly extracted anywhere from 6% to 15% in transaction fees. Over a year, these high expenses eat up significant funds that families back home could otherwise use for vital living costs, health, and education.
"Navigating these complex, manual hurdles was the biggest challenge to achieving the growth we’re now experiencing," explains Jose Angelo “Gio” Calma, Co-Founder of BCRemit. "Luckily, it was a pain point that the adoption of new technologies such as blockchain and digital assets ultimately resolved for us."
BCRemit needed a licensed local infrastructure partner that could connect cutting-edge digital asset technology directly with the Philippine banking ecosystem to achieve true scale.
That search led them to Coins.ph.
Building a 24/7 Digital Asset Routing System
Joining forces with Coins.ph in 2019 allowed BCRemit to eliminate its back-end liquidity hurdles and use a faster alternative to traditional networks, dramatically improving transaction speeds and lowering costs for users.
- Blockchain-Enabled Routing: BCRemit utilizes digital assets over blockchain networks to move value instantly across borders. This real-world utility attracted global blockchain giants like Ripple, Circle, Tether, Stellar, and Celo to help build out the solution.
- Instant Fiat Conversion: Coins.ph provides the critical local link, leveraging its regulatory compliance, tech stack, and licenses to instantly convert incoming digital assets into Philippine Pesos (PHP).
- Real-Time Payouts: Operating under its Electronic Money Issuer (EMI) license from the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), Coins.ph instantly routes the converted funds directly to the beneficiaries' bank accounts, e-wallets, or cash pickup locations across an expansive network of over 120 local institutions. The entire process happens in real-time, 24/7, without traditional quotations or weekend delays.
Dropping Fees to 1% and Scaling Globally
Integrating with Coins.ph solved BCRemit's liquidity dilemmas and unlocked true, real-time cross-border transfers. BCRemit passed these back-end savings directly to its users instead of absorbing them as profit.
Shifting away from legacy infrastructure allowed BCRemit to drop its standard transaction rates down to just 1%. Compared to all-time highs of 15% in the industry, this represented a 93% lower remittance cost for its users.
This 1% rate soundly beats the global average remittance fee of 6.4% and shatters the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target of 3%.
Adopting this blockchain infrastructure perfectly positioned BCRemit to capitalize on massive transactional growth. The qualitative impact is best measured by the total peace of mind given to users: the constant worry about whether funds have arrived has been completely replaced by instant confirmation notifications.
Why Infrastructure Matters: A Quick Comparison
Operational Excellence & Innovation
Reducing costs is only part of the equation; reliability and long-term tech alignment are equally important to both companies.
"Living and working in a foreign land away from your family is already emotionally and physically draining, and my dad experienced this firsthand having been an OFW for most of my life," says Gio. "When you cannot send money home immediately during emergencies, or when you see a massive chunk of your hard-earned salary eaten up by high fees and poor exchange rates, it only makes that distance feel much more painful. Our partnership with Coins.ph directly addresses this burden for Filipino families. Combining our platform with their network allows us to remove the friction of traditional money transfers, ensuring every dollar or euro saved stays in the pockets of our kababayans where it belongs."
Wei Zhou, CEO of Coins.ph, shared his vision for the ongoing alliance: "At Coins.ph, our goal is to serve as the critical infrastructure partner that powers global financial inclusion. Building a faster, more efficient financial plumbing behind the scenes allows us to connect more people and optimize cross-border movement—empowering migrant workers and their families back home, one transaction at a time."
Future Roadmap
BCRemit has expanded its remittance services from the UK to the EU, US, and Canada. Moving forward, BCRemit and Coins.ph plan to leverage their shared appetite for innovation to take this infrastructure to every corner of the world.