On January 31, 2019, the FSC approved two applications including the “FinTech Innovative Experiment of Small Amount Cross-border Wire Transfers” of the Taiwan branch of Hong Kong’s EMQ Limited and the “FinTech Innovative Experiment of Salary Wire Transfers for Migrant Workers” of Welldone Co., Ltd. The main content of the experiments is cross-border wire transfers service for migrant workers. After migrant workers input the wire transfers information into the Apps on their smart phones and pay through a convenience store, an outlet of the two companies, an ATM, an online bank or a physical bank, the two companies will pay for the beneficiaries with the funds in their own accounts at a cooperative overseas financial institution, and then reimburse the amount remitted by the originators to their accounts. In this way, it can reduce the cost of wire transfers and the time required for the remitted money to arrive and increase the convenience and accessibility.
According to the figures released by the Ministry of Labor, there were around 700,000 migrant workers in Taiwan as of the end of 2018. The remittance fee of the two innovative experiments each time is between NT$150 to NT$300. If each migrant worker remits once through the experiments, compared to the minimum remittance fee by banks which is NT$400, all the migrant workers will save between NT$70 million to NT$175 million on remittance fees, which is not including the handling fees of the offshore banks.