Monito's mission is to help you save on transfer fees and exchange rates
Monito is an award-winning digital start-up on a mission to save the world $28 billion in excessive money transfer fees and bad exchange rates paid each year!
We're building the Booking.com for money transfers. We help people sending money abroad find, compare and review money transfer providers in real-time.
Monito's story
We founded Monito to tackle the excessive costs of transferring money across borders. Our three founders, François, Laurent and Pascal, were personally confronted with this issue in different ways.
François and Pascal (yes, they're brothers!) first encountered high fees when they started sending money to Cameroon to fund the nonprofit organization they created as kids.
Laurent first confronted the problem while receiving money from his parents during his studies in Hong Kong.As Monito grew, we chatted with our users and brought new team members on board. We discovered that our frustration was shared by millions of people around the world in different situations, from migrants to digital nomads.
How Monito can save you money
You shop around before booking a flight or a hotel room so you can get the best value for you money, right? The same is true for money transfers: if you compare your options before making an international transfer, you can save money.
When you launch a comparison, we fetch the fees and exchange rates of all available providers to help you find the best option for your transfer. You can save up to 90% in comparison with your bank or the most expensive providers.
An award winning start-up
Best Swiss Startup 2018 - Prix Strategis
Best Swiss Fintech Pitch 2017 - Venture Leaders Fintech, New York
Jury's award 2016 - PERL (Prix pour l'Entrepreneuriat Région Lausanne)
Top 20 European Fintech Startups 2016 - TechTour
Social Impact Award 2014 - Impact Hub Zurich
“We founded Monito because we believe sending money around the world should be cheap, fast and convenient”
A simple idea to solve a complex problem
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 according to the World Bank.
Average cost of sending money to different part of the world
But if everyone was using the cheapest available provider, we estimate that $28 billion could be saved each year in transfer fees and bad exchange rates.
How it all started
In February 2013, Monito's founders François, Laurent and Pascal 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.
Continue reading
- When it comes to exchanging money, paying for your transfer, understanding exchange rates and more, it’s important to understand what all the details mean. We’ve got you covered, with our complete Monito glossary and guide to the main…
- You shop around before booking a flight or a hotel room so you can get the best value for you money, right? The same is true for money transfers: if you compare your options before making an international transfer, you can save money! …
- We started Monito after we experienced the frustration of losing tons of money on international transfer fees ourselves. Our mission is to empower millions of people around the world to make the best decision about money transfers, and…
- Monito is an award-winning digital start-up on a mission to save the world $28 billion in excessive money transfer fees and bad exchange rates paid each year! We're building the Booking.com for money transfers. We help people sending …