What is the RBI Sandbox?
Under the Regulatory Sandbox, RBI allows responsible innovation in financial services that promote new age and mostly high-tech financial products that bring cost benefits and convenience to the end user. The regulatory sandbox involves the live testing of new technology-led financial services to examine their efficiency before they are launched to a wider audience.
BookMyForex Significance
India’s leading foreign exchange marketplace, BookMyForex has been selected by the Reserve Bank of India to carry out cross border payments under regulatory sandbox to create an outward foreign remittance process flow that significantly improves customer user experience, reduces transaction costs, facilitates better tracking and ensures that the KYC/ AML requirements stipulated by RBI are met and even surpassed.
BookMyForex’s innovation solution comes from leveraging alternative, new age cross border money transfer rails developed by Visa and MasterCard. These new rails allow international money transfers at significantly lower costs, with live tracking and with the customers receiving the funds abroad in near real-time. On top of this BookMyForex has adopted new age KYC and AML processes that allow the customer’s KYC/ AML and the subsequent payment in lieu of the remittance to be completed online in a matter of a few minutes.
Customers can make international money transfers to the UK, Canada and select European countries for purposes such as Gift, maintenance of close relatives, Education fees, immigration, employment, etc. Each transfer must not exceed USD 5000 in value (or equivalent in another currency). Each customer is allowed to transact at most 3 times over the 12 week testing period starting September 30 2021.
Furthermore, apart from bank-bank transfers, customers can also send international money transfers from their account to the beneficiary’s Visa debit card for instant use.
Currently, bank to bank transfers are being processed using MasterCard rails and bank to debit card transfers are processed using Visa rails. Bank to bank payments are currently possible in GBP and CAD for accounts located in UK and Canada. Transfers to EU countries will also be enabled in a few days.
On the other hand, customers can transfer funds from their bank account in India to Visa debit cards issued by a limited set of banks in the UK, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Norway, Poland, Ukraine and Oman. More countries are likely to be enabled soon as well.
Few other points to note for cross border remittances:
- Transfers can only be booked during bank treasury hours (10 am to 3:30 pm Mon – Friday excluding bank holidays)
- Customers must be physically located in India to transfer funds overseas via the RBI sandbox
- Customers must have an Aadhar card and a linked mobile phone and must consent to authenticating themselves using Aadhar OTP based KYC
- Customers may only pay for the transfers online via Net-banking, from a savings account in their own name
Benefits to the Customer
- Fast Execution: While carrying these transactions, the foreign beneficiary will receive the funds within a few minutes to a few hours as it is 10x faster than a regular SWIFT transfer.
- No nostro/ receiving bank charges: These transactions will be carried out with absolutely no charges like nostro or receiving bank charges irrespective of whether the foreign bank has any incoming wire transfer charges or not.
- Real time tracking: Unlike traditional SWIFT transfers, you get live updates about your transfers
- Remarkable Savings: To carry out these transactions typically the bank charges between 10 GBP – 40 GBP but here, there are no such charges levied so the savings are considerable.
- Zero Paperwork: These transactions involve zero paperwork and will be carried out completely digitally as it involves automated online KYC and AML checks.
