Sentbe

Under the Korean government's foreign employment system, the status of migrant workers, including their minimum wage and a package of social securities, is guaranteed. However, it appears to be ironic that they have difficulties in accessing formal remittance service due to its expensive fee and inconvenience. According to a study done by IOM and KOICA, 81% of Nepali respondents to the survey informally sent money to home mainly through individual brokers, known as Hundi despite the high risk.

Sentbe has reduced the cost of remittance to 1.2% of the total remitted amount while it appears that the remittance cost of banks remains at 8% in practice. Sentbe's users can make remittance requests within 20 seconds and receivers can receive funds 5 minutes after the request while banks' remittance takes 3-5 days. Sentbe helps users send money to bank account but also cash pickup or delivery service channels so that recipients also experience easiness.

Sentbe mainly targets migrant workers who have long been underserved by traditional banks in Korea. Sentbe identifies this segmentation has substantial in volume: as of 2017, 437,100 migrant workers are formally employed in Korea and the bilateral remittance from Korea to low- and middle-income countries amounted to 5.64 billion USD. Sentbe designs its online service pages and apps in 10 languages and has customer service staff and agents having the same nationalities with customers. Sentbe users, mostly migrant workers in Korea, have saved 34 million USD mainly with its lower cost.