Remessa Online Review: Transfer Fees, Safety, Usability, and Monito's Verdict
Remessa Online is a good money transfer service (8.3/10), recommended by Monito's experts for international money transfers from Brazil. A relatively new company, Remessa Online was founded in 2016. It has gained praise from customers (9.2/10) and is a large and fast-growing company with solid credibility and security (9.5/10) through its state-of-the-art digital money transfer platforms (7.8/10). In terms of its fee and exchange rates, while Remessa Online is often not competitive in relation to its global competitors (6.8/10), it does consistently offer the cheapest transfers abroad from Brazil according to data from Monito.
What Monito Likes About Remessa Online
- Low fees and competitive exchange rates;
- A slick and well-designed website and mobile app;
- Fees are transparently broken down on the homepage;
- Low-cost options to receive money from abroad.
What Monito Dislikes About Remessa Online
- Transfers are only available from Brazil;
- Only one sending currency (BRL) is supported;
- Only nine receiving currencies are supported;
- Around 78% of fees are hidden in the exchange rate;
- Tepid feedback from customers in terms of app security.
Monito's Recommendation
Remessa Online is one of the best options out there for transferring money overseas from Brazil, and we highly recommend it for this purpose.
However, while competitive, Remessa Online is sometimes not the cheapest service for these transfers and doesn't offer cash pickup transfers. Therefore, if cost is important to you or if you'd like to send cash, we recommend running a search on Monito's comparison engine instead.
Key Questions About Remessa Online Answered
Who Is Remessa Online For?
Remessa Online is a service available to Brazilian residents who'd like to send and receive international bank transfers between Brazil and the US, UK, Eurozone, Australia, Canada, Switzerland, Japan, Argentina, or Chile. It offers transparent fees and exchange rates that are among the best on the market, making it an all-around excellent service for sending abroad from Brazil.
See How Remessa Online Stacks Up
How Monito Reviewed Remessa Online's Services
As with all services reviewed by Monito, Remessa Online underwent a rigorous evaluation to assess the quality of its service. To begin with, our experts opened a Remessa Online account to test out its functionalities, including the ease of registration and speed of transferring money, which provided a well-rounded overview of the platform's strengths and limitations. Next, we weighed this score against several other key criteria, including customer reviews, percentage of fees constituted by exchange rate margins, pay-in options, access to customer service, as well as business and legal metrics such as volume transferred, appropriate authorization, and company size. Finally, we analyzed tens of thousands of searches on Monito's comparison engine to determine how often Remessa Online was the cheapest service and how often it was competitive against its rivals over the past three months, giving a reliable overview of the service's pricing in relation to the market. As with all Monito Scores, Remessa Online's score was peer-reviewed by at least one Monito expert.
Reviews are written independently by Monito's editors and recommendations given are our own. Services you sign up with using our links may earn us a commission.
Remessa Online at a Glance
Trust & Credibility
Background check
Remessa Online is duly supervised by the Brazilian Central Bank, the authority in charge of regulating financial institutions in the country.
Security & reliability
Remessa Online's website is fully secured and uses top-notch security protocols, including segregated user accounts and HTTPS.
Company size
Founded in 2016, Remessa Online is a fast-growing money transfer company handling around R$31 billion in transactions for some 400 thousand total customers.
Can I Trust Remessa Online?
Having moved some R$31 billion across borders for more than 400 thousand customers to date, Remessa Online might not be the biggest transfer company, but it's undoubtedly trustworthy.
Is Remessa Online Safe?
A fully licensed financial services company authorized by the Central Bank of Brazil, Remessa Online is undoubtedly a credible and legitimate institution, and you can rest assured that your money would be safe in their hands.
However, Remessa Online appears to lag slightly behind when it comes to customer perception of their security, especially on Google Play Store. Many customers have complained about long waits and an inability to access their accounts. However, it's worth pointing out that Remessa Online frequently responds to customer concerns and takes negative feedback in this area seriously.
Service & Quality
Opening an account
Opening an account with Remessa Online is straightforward and easy to do, although it can take some time to finish.
Making a transfer
Once you have a Remessa Online account open and ready, making a new money transfer is a fast and simple process.
Contacting support
Reaching out to customer service is simple using a dedicated hotline and live chat features.
Remessa Online's Service Quality
Although limited in terms of pay-in options (only bank transfers are supported), Remessa Online shines when it comes to the ease of opening, using, and managing an account. On both its website and its mobile app, Remessa Online offers an all-around easy-to-use service, providing customers with a swift registration process guided by simple, clear language every step of the way.
All-in-all, registration for Brazilian residents should take a matter of minutes, after which they'll be ready to send money abroad.
Perhaps the weakest point of Remessa Online's service is its limited scope. This is because the company only deals with transfers from Brazilian reals and only includes customers who are from Brazil itself, meaning that its services are quite restricted indeed. Furthermore, while it is possible to send money to many countries using Remissa Online, the website only lists 15 at this time, making the service far more limited in this regard than its closest competitor, TransferWise.
What's more, Remessa Online only allows its customers to send money using a bank transfer, meaning that it's rather inflexible in terms of payment options, as it doesn't offer other frequently-used payment methods such as credit/debit card payments and cash payments.
Monito's Impressions During Our Test
With its well-designed and simple-to-use website and mobile app, Remessa Online's money transfer platform impressed our reviewers with its user-friendliness and speedy loading times. Opening an account at Remessa is very simple both in the app and on the web, because after pre-registration, they only ask for an official document with a photo. The process was handled smoothly and included helpful tooltips and colorful illustrations along the way. Sending money was similarly straightforward, guided by clear instructions and a seamless all-around user experience.
Use Pix to Send Money with Remessa Online
Remessa launched PIX in June and is available to all customers, making it convenient for users in Brazil. PIX is a fast payment system operated by the Central Bank of Brazil since 2020. You can use PIX payments to make purchases, pay bills, and send and receive money. Unlike a TED or DOC payments in Brazil, which can take a few days, PIX is instant and secure.
Fees & Exchange Rates
Transfers to a bank account
While Remessa Online was virtually never competitively priced, it was the cheapest option for bank transfers from Brazil in 83% of Monito searches over the first three months of 2021.
Remessa Online's Fees & Exchange Rates
Remessa Online is very often the cheapest transfer service from Brazil on Monito’s search engine, although it's not very competitive on a global scale. The service charges a minimum exchange rate margin fee of 1.3% on all transfers abroad. While popular currencies such as the British pound, US dollar, and Euro have their margins at or around that amount; these fees can go as high as 3% or 4% for some currencies, such as the Japanese yen and the Chilean peso.
Aside from the exchange rate margin, other potential costs might include a fixed fee of several reals depending on the country to which you're sending, as well as another commission fee (referred to as a "Financial transaction tax") that tends to range anywhere between 0% and 1% of the transfer.
Despite these fees, Remessa Online remains among the cheapest providers on money transfers from Brazil. In fact, the service ranked as the cheapest provider of all on more than half (52%) of all searches on our comparison engine over the past year. What's more, the service was cheapest of all on nearly two in five (39%) of searches to the US and one in five (21%) of searches to Portugal.
How Transparent Is Remessa Online About Its Pricing?
While the exchange rate margin does indeed take up a large share of the fees you'll pay when sending money abroad with Remessa Online (something that usually implies a lack of transparency due to the fact that these fees are often hidden), the service does admittedly do a fair job of explaining the cost breakdown to customers long before any money is sent.
When visiting Remessa Online's homepage, you'll get a complete breakdown of the basic cost elements of your transfer, including the mid-market exchange rate (the "Câmbio comercial"), the exchange rate margin (the "Custo"), as well as a fixed fee (the "Tarifa bancária") and a commission fee (the "IOF" or "Imposto sobre operações financeiras") where they're applicable. This is all topped off with a final quote of the exchange rate at which you'll be charged, with all of the fees built-in (the "VET"), as well a figure showing exactly what the beneficiary can expect to receive in their local currency.
All in all, this provides customers with a fair overview of what they can expect to pay when sending money abroad, making Remessa Online a fairly transparent service.
Compare Remessa Online's Fees & Exchange Rates Now
Customer Satisfaction
Customer review score
Remessa Online has made a very good impression on its customers overall, earning 4.5/5 stars on Google Maps, Facebook, the App Store, and Google Play Store.
Number of positive reviews
With fewer than 750 four- or five-star reviews on Google Maps, Facebook, the App Store, and Google Play Store combined, Remessa Online has not yet built an extensive track record among its users.
Customer Reviews of Remessa Online
Although Remessa Online doesn't yet have a long track record, customers have expressed positive feedback on the service so far.
Remessa Online has so far received positive reviews from its customers online. On Google Play Store, for example, Remessa Online scores 4.8 out of 5 stars from a total of 4,296 reviews. While the service has done well on the App Store too, scoring 4.9 out of 5 stars. It's well worth noting that Remessa Online has only had 67 reviews there so far, meaning that it's a bit difficult to accurately assess customer feedback.
Other Money Transfer Guides on Remessa Online and Brazil
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