Sending Money To India With Xoom: Monito's Review

Well-known among Indians living abroad, Xoom is a Paypal-backed money transfer service offering fairly competitive exchange rates to the Indian rupee. While not always the cheapest provider on Monito's comparison engine and only transferring to India from a limited number of countries, Xoom nonetheless offers many key advantages including speedy deposits to Indian bank accounts, PayPal integration, cheap cash pickup options, and more.

Take a look at our in-depth guide below to discover Xoom's costs, how often it's the cheapest service, its pay-out and receiving options, as well as its best alternatives:

A PayPal-owned company, San Francisco-based money transfer service Xoom is an all-around solid option for sending money to India, especially for cash pickups. Although it's usually not the cheapest for bank deposits, the service boasts fast and secure transfers through a wide variety of pay-out options from your mobile phone, tablet, or PC, including bank, PayPal, credit, and debit card transfers.

Unfortunately, Xoom currently doesn't support transfers to India from countries other than the US, UK, Canada, and the European Union. This rather limited scope of service means that if you'd like to send money to India from somewhere else, you'll need to use another service.

Xoom Transfers Cost to India

Every time you send money abroad, you'll pay one (or both) of two major types of fees. The first is a service fee, which will come in the form of a fixed fee or a commission, levied on each transfer that you make. The second fee comes in when you're charged the difference between the "real" exchange rate (known as the mid-market exchange rate) and the rate which your currency exchange provider decides on. This difference is known as the exchange rate margin and is expressed as a percentage.

When it comes to money transfers to India with Xoom, you will pay a mix of fixed and commission fees for different transfer and receiving methods and amounts. In addition, you will also pay an exchange rate margin, which is relatively low with Xoom and which will remain the same regardless of which pay-out method you choose.

Bear in mind that Xoom charges a variable exchange rate margin that decreases in relation to the size of the transfer. For example, if you were to send a smaller transfer of, say, US$500 to India, your exchange rate margin would be around 1.1%. Meanwhile, if you were to send a larger transfer of US$10,000, your exchange rate margin would be only around 0.4% instead.

Is Xoom Worth It?

The short answer: if you're sending money from the US to India for cash pickup, then yes!

However, in pretty much all other cases, Xoom will probably not offer you the best deal — and may not even be available in your country at all.

This can be seen based on how Xoom has recently performed on Monito's real-time comparison engine, which ranks money transfer providers in order of their fees and exchange rates. By analysing hundreds of thousands of comparisons ran between November 2020 and January 2021, we found that Xoom was the cheapest overall on 32% of cash pickup transfers to India from the countries in which Xoom is available for sending. This (already impressive) number is especially true in the US, where Xoom was the cheapest cash pickup service to India on nearly nine in every ten searches!

On this note, keep in mind that Xoom sadly doesn't transfer money to India for cash pickup that exceeds ₹50,0000 (about US$680). To transfer ₹50,0000 or above, you'll need to choose to send the money for bank deposit, a service in which Xoom is far less competitive, according to our research. For bank deposit searches on Monito's comparison engine, Xoom was the cheapest on only 0.17% of searches between November 2020 and January 2021.

Take a look below to see how this plays out for individual countries and currencies:

How To Send Money To India With Xoom

Using Xoom to send money to India is an all-around easy process. As a customer, you'll find Xoom's homepage to be very clear and very easy to understand (albeit quite rudimentary), and opening an account and setting up your transfer with them should be quick and easy.

To do so, you'll either need to have a PayPal account or be ready to open one. To send money with Xoom, you don't need to use your PayPal balance (although you can choose to do so), but the service is integrated with PayPal, meaning you'll need to set up your credit or US debit card in PayPal in order to make a transfer to India with Xoom.

Once you've got your PayPal account up and running and have logged into Xoom with it, you'll be able to specify the currency (USD, EUR, CAD, GBP) and the amount you'd like to send to India. The next step will be to choose whether you'd like your beneficiary to receive the money via bank deposit or in cash. Once this is done, you'll need to enter their banking details, and then you'll be free to make the transfer either from your bank balance, your PayPal balance, or from your credit card or your US debit card.

Is Xoom Right For You?

All things considered, Xoom is an all-around solid option for sending money to India from countries where it's supported. As a customer, you'll enjoy very fast transfers, high security, relatively low fees and exchange rates, and a clean and simple web interface.

However, because of the number of better deals available for transfers to India using the bank deposit option, and because Xoom tends to be outmatched for transfers from the EU, Canada, and the UK to India, we only recommend Xoom for cash pickup transfers from the US. (Naturally, this only applies if your transfer is under the ₹50,0000 limit for cash pickup transfers.) However, even here, providers like Remitly are far cheaper than Xoom for practically all transfers, and we recommend them instead.

For all other transfers, we recommend you explore other providers that are, on average, much cheaper than Xoom for bank deposit transfers to India. According to our research, the similar money transfer services Wise, Remitly, and Skrill were the cheapest transfer providers to India on a combined 87% of searches on Monito's comparison engine over the last three months. To find out more about sending money online for bank transfers, in particular, take a look at our review of Remitly's transfers to India.

On the other hand, if you're looking to find the cheapest service on every transfer to India no matter what, then we'd recommend that find real-time and up-to-date data on our comparison engine: