DBS Remit: The Ultimate Money Transfer Review

DBS Remit, the low-cost money transfer service offered to DBS clients, offers competitive rates when sending money abroad from Singapore. Despite usually not being the cheapest service of all and despite offering only a limited number of destinations and currencies, DBS Remit may nevertheless be a good choice for you depending on your individual circumstances.

Take a look at our full in-depth review below to discover if and when DBS Remit might make sense for you and, if not, which alternatives could offer you the price and flexibility you're looking for:

Monito's Independent Review of DBS Remit

DBS Remit — launched by banking giant Development Bank of Singapore (DBS) in 2016 — is a high-speed, low-cost money transfer service available exclusively to DBS clients.

Built-in to DBS's online banking service, digibank, DBS Remit was founded to speed up international money transfers to major countries to which people remit from Singapore. The service was also founded to help clients to dodge the very high costs that had previously been associated with sending standard telegraphic transfers abroad from the city-state.

Today, DBS Remit offers some of the most competitive rates you'll find on the market for remittances abroad from Singapore, with its exchange rates often running neck-in-neck with those of big-name low-cost transfer services such as Wise and CurrencyFair.

What Monito Likes About DBS Remit

• Fees and exchange rate margins are quite competitive;
• High level of security as part of DBS, the safest bank in Asia;
• Speedy, same-day transfers (if sent before the cut-off time);
• High daily transfer maximum of S$200,000.

What Monito Dislikes About DBS Remit

• Exchange rate margins are not transparent;
• Limited reach, with only 17 receiving currencies available;
• Cut-off times for sending money abroad are very rigid;
• Available only to DBS clients;
• Exchange rates aren't quoted at all times for CNY, MMK, and MYR.

DBS Remit Fees & Exchange Rates

When it comes to paying for your transfer abroad, DBS Remit is a very cheap service indeed. In fact, compared to what you'd be paying in total fees on an ordinary DBS telegraphic transfer to one of the currencies that DBS Remit doesn't cover, you'd be saving upwards of 90% in fees!

These excellent rates are a result of DBS Remit's low fee structure. In essence, so long as you're transferring to one of the currencies available on the service, you'll be paying no commission fees, fixed fees, or bank fees of any sort whatsoever.

No Base Fees, Low Hidden Fees

Contrary to how the service markets itself, you will pay a small exchange rate margin on every transfer you send with DBS Remit. This means that the exchange rate that the service offers you will be ever-so-slightly worse than the mid-market exchange rate (i.e. the one you'd see on Google), with DBS taking the difference as profit.

Fortunately enough, DBS Remit's exchange rate margins are fairly attractive. While the service doesn't make it clear that its exchange rates are different from the mid-market exchange rates and that you'll therefore be charged a small fee on each transfer, our research has revealed that these fees range between 0.6% and 1.8% of the transfer amount, depending on the currency.

DBS Remit: How Fees & Exchange Rates Compare

DBS Remit's fees and exchange rates are very much on par with Singapore's cheapest money transfer services, the main examples being CurrencyFair, Wise, Skrill, and InstaReM.

However, despite often coming very close, our research has found that DBS Remit doesn't manage to clinch the spot as the cheapest remittance service from Singapore on any of the corridors we analysed. Take a look at the scrollable table below to get a better picture of how DBS Remit stacks up against the cheapest providers for select major destinations (as of 29/10/2020 at 18:00 GMT+02:00):

Be aware that both exchange rates and currency exchange fees fluctuate quickly and without notice. We'd recommend using Monito's comparison engine below to get the latest price data for money transfer providers:

How Easy Is It to Send Money With DBS Remit?

All things considered, DBS Remit is very much an easy-to-use service.

As a DBS client, you can use DBS Remit on your digibank online banking profile or using the digibank mobile app. Either way, the experience is straightforward and seamless, with simple prompts and explanations along the way and a clean interface that intuitively helps you make sense of the transfer process.

To send a transfer with DBS Remit, you'll need to login to digibank online or mobile banking, and select the Pay & Transfer option, just as you'd do on a normal transfer. From there, click Overseas, and then simply specify both a country and a currency that's eligible for DBS Remit's services.

However, one word of caution is that it's not always clear whether or not the service is activated — even once you've selected an eligible destination country and receiving currency.

As a customer, you'll have to be on the lookout for one or both of two small icons, a red “DBS Remit” icon and/or a yellow “zero-fee” icon to confirm that DBS Remit will indeed be activated for your transfer. This is the only major facet of DBS Remit's ease-of-use that we found to be potentially problematic, as it may not always be obvious to a customer whether or not they're using the service at all.

Credibility & Security

As a transfer service, DBS Remit is as safe as they come. Because it's an intrinsic feature of DBS's online and mobile banking, the service enjoys a very high level of security, allowing you to add extra layers of security such as two-factor authentication and biometric authentication.

What's more, the service is completely run by DBS, a well-established bank with a long history in the global banking scene established by the Singaporean government in 1968. Today, DBS operates more than 250 branches across the globe. According to Global Finance Magazine's World's Safest Banks index, it is not only Southeast Asia's largest bank in terms of total assets, but it has also consistently been Asia’s safest bank every year since 2009.

As a DBS client, you can, therefore, rest assured that your money is in excellent hands when it comes to making a transfer using the DBS Remit service.

Service & Coverage

DBS Remit is rather limited when it comes to the scope of its service. All in all, the service is only available to DBS clients and for transfers to particular locations and currencies. While as many as 49 countries are available for the service, DBS Remit will only apply if you're sending using one of 17 currencies.

Furthermore, DBS Remit also imposes cut-off times — some of which are very early — for same-day transfers to go through. This means that the funds will need to be sent before a certain time for your money to reach its destination the same day as you send it. If not, the funds will only arrive on the next working day (which might be after a weekend or bank holiday).

Take a look at the 17 countries and currencies for which DBS Remit is eligible below, as well as the relevant cut-off times (in Singapore time GMT +08:00):

• Australia (Australian dollar) ~ 12:00
• Canada (Canadian dollar) ~ 17:00
• Eurozone (Euro) ~ 17:00
• Hong Kong (Hong Kong dollar) ~ 16:30
• India (Indian rupee) ~ 16:30
• Indonesia (Indonesian rupiah) ~ 14:00
• Japan (Japanese yen) ~ 10:30
• South Korea (South Korean won) ~ 14:00
• China (Chinese yuan) ~ 15:00
• Malaysia (Malaysian ringgit) ~ 14:00
• Myanmar (Burmese kyat) ~ 12:00
• New Zealand (New Zealand dollar) ~ 10:00
• The Philippines (Philippine peso) ~ 14:00
• Thailand (Thai baht) ~ 11:30
• United Kingdom (British pound sterling) ~ 17:00
• United States (US dollar) ~ 17:00
• Vietnam (Vietnamese đồng) ~ 14:30

Customer Satisfaction

While no customer satisfaction ratings exist for DBS Remit specifically, customers have voiced wide approval for DBS's online and mobile banking service, digibank. On both Google Play Store and the App Store, the mobile app has received solid 4.5 and 4.2 out of 5 stars, respectively, out of some 30,000 reviews.

While DBS Remit has no specific reviews, some customers have been inconvenienced while using the service due to unforeseen delays in their transfer arrival. Based on the FAQs on DBS Remit's landing page, notwithstanding customers sending money after cut-off times or not filling in all the required information, DBS Remit has stated that anti-fraud anti-money laundering regulatory checks can cause some processing delays.

Customer Support

Using DBS Remit will allow you access to a wide variety of customer support, and you should have no trouble in getting in touch with somebody if you run into a problem. DBS — and by extension DBS Remit — are fully equipped for customer service, up to and including phone support, and messaging and live chat features in the mobile app.

How Transparent Is DBS Remit?

As we touched on earlier, DBS Remit is not completely transparent when it comes to its pricing.

This because the service implies that you'll be charged no fees when making a transfer abroad. And while it's true that DBS's standard cable charges, handling fees, and (potential) agent charges don't apply to transfers using DBS Remit, the service makes no mention of the fact that a small exchange rate margin is added onto the transfer — instead choosing to bury mention of the fee in its terms and conditions.

Furthermore, DBS Remit doesn't quote exchange rates for Chinese yen, Malaysian ringgit, and Burmese kyat transfers at all times, making it difficult to estimate the costs of transfers to these currencies.

For broad reference, we found that DBS Remit's exchange rate margins tend to be lowest for USD, GBP, and CAD transfers, which sit at around 0.8% of the total transfer amount. On the other hand, we found that these margins tend to be highest for INR, PHP, and IDR transfers, which are around 1.7% of the total transfer amount.

All of this considered, our verdict is that DBS Remit is misleadingly promoting its service and that customers should be aware of the hidden fees that go along with making a transfer.

Is DBS Remit Right for You?

DBS Remit is, without a doubt, a cheap, flexible, and high-quality money transfer service that deserves your attention if you're a customer of DBS. Should you already be using digibank and are comfortable with its services, and should you not mind paying fractionally more for transfers abroad, then we recommend that you stick with DBS Remit, as it will probably give you everything that you're looking for.

On the other hand, if you're a DBS customer who values making savings on every transfer abroad, or if you plan to send money to one of the countries for which DBS Remit is not eligible, then we'd recommend that you explore other options instead. (This would similarly be the case if you're not a DBS customer and looking for a low-cost money transfer service to send cash abroad).

While providers such as CurrencyFair and WorldRemit have shown up a lot in our review so far, they are, in fact, not the cheapest providers overall when it comes to remitting from Singapore. According to our analysis of over a hundred thousand searches on our comparison engine over the past twelve months, the three cheapest currency exchange providers from Singapore were actually Skrill, InstaReM, and Wise, which were the cheapest providers 45%, 19%, and 12% of the time respectively.

Take a look at the reviews and the site links for these three providers below:

Photo credit: Deyoadutrys, distributed under a CC-BY 3.0 license without modification