Our mission
Helping you save money
Every year, millions of people around the world send billions of dollars back home to support their families. However, a significant share of this money never reaches its recipients due to hefty transfer costs. Indeed, for every $100 sent, a recipient will only receive $92 on average.
Sending money abroad is a complex and opaque business, a lot of different services, no clear information about the fees and exchange rates, and you don’t know who you can really trust with your hard earned money.
Average cost of sending money to different part of the world
Our story
“We founded Monito because we believe sending money around the world should be cheap, fast and convenient”
As kids, we started a non-profit organization with our cousins to support the population of N’tolo, a small village in Cameroon. Ever since then, we’ve been frustrated with the money we’ve lost to transfer fees and poor exchange rates. Fifteen years later, we realized that hundreds of millions of migrants around the world were struggling with the exact same problem as us when sending money back home. That’s when we decided to create Monito.
We discovered that what was missing wasn’t yet another money transfer service, but a way to easily find and compare all the existing services. We started developing Monito with the goal of empowering migrants, expatriates and international students with the information they need to find and use better ways to send money abroad.
Our solution
More transparent information
Monito helps you find and compare all the options to send your money across the world. Depending on your needs, we’ll rank money transfer services based on their cost, speed or trustworthiness.
We list more than 450 money transfer operators across 170 countries, and these numbers keep increasing!
Compare nowOur team
Meet the people behind Monito
François Briod
CEO
François is the visionary of Monito. He has our mission firmly at heart, and makes sure we have all the resources and the strategy we need to achieve it.
Pascal Briod
Head of Product
Pascal masters the product development of Monito, ensuring that your needs are fully understood and met with a world-class product.
Laurent Oberholzer
Head of Business Development
Laurent manages Monito’s relations with money transfer companies. He’s the one you can thank for getting them and their exclusive deals on the site for you.
Olivier Bertrand
Head of Technology
Drawing on his extensive experience in web and software development, Olivier leads all the technical aspects of delivering Monito to you.
Jeremy Legrand
Senior Software Engineer
Stefano Grassi
Senior Software Engineer
Loeiza Viau
Senior Search Engine Marketing Specialist
Recognition
Press and awards
Monito is an award-winning Swiss FinTech startup participating in the shift of the boiling remittances industry towards electronic channels. We have partnered with the International Organization for Migration and the Swiss government to catalyze our social impact and reach within migrant communities worldwide.
We are a team of experts and thought leaders in the field of international money transfers, and are regularly invited to speak at industry conferences (e.g.Global Money Transfer Summit, International Money Transfer Conference, etc.) and in the press.
Our journey
A simple idea to solve a complex problem
In February 2013, we attended a Startup Weekend in Lausanne, Switzerland. Our goal? To come up with a solution to the excessive fees levied on remittances. We quickly identified that the root of the problem was a lack of information, transparency, and awareness of the issue of hidden fees. Six months later, we launched Monito, a simple website allowing users to compare many different money transfer services at a glance.
The very next day, journalists started calling us with requests for interviews. Our website had struck a chord, as the problem we were trying to solve was huge in both numbers and importance for many different people. This sudden media attention kickstarted the website’s growth, with an increasing number of users coming to the website and more and more providers compared. This encouraged us to keep on working on the platform to make it more useful and easy to use.
In the summer of 2014, having won a few startup competitions and with our revenues (and expenses!) starting to rise, we decided to take a leap of faith into the unknown. We created a company and dedicated ourselves to the project full time. We continued to develop features to help our users make smarter decisions when sending money abroad, including the production of in-depth text and video reviews of various providers. In August 2016, exactly three years after the release of TawiPay, we decided to change the website’s name to Monito.
What lies ahead? We don’t know, but one thing’s for sure: we stay firmly committed to our mission of empowering our users to triumph over unfair transfer fees for the better.