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Bank of America Scraps Mexico Wire Transfer Fees
Fee
waiver should attract more business from Mexican workers as banks fight for
Hispanic customers.
NEW YORK (Reuters)
September 28, 2007
— Bank of America Corp. said Wednesday it has begun offering customers free wire
transfers to Mexico, hoping to win more business from Mexican workers in the
United States who wire cash home.
The rollout expands a program begun in January
in Chicago. The fee waiver comes with a requirement that customers open checking
accounts with the No. 2 U.S. bank, which is based in Charlotte, North Carolina.
"Adding the free SafeSend feature to our
checking accounts is our way of saying that we want to be the bank of choice
[for Hispanics]," said Liam McGee, the bank's president of global consumer and
small-business banking, in a statement.
The changes raise the stakes in U.S. banks'
push to attract Hispanics, who this decade overtook blacks as the largest U.S.
minority group. More than half of the roughly 40 million Hispanics in the United
States are Mexicans.
Under the new Bank of America (down $0.32 to
$41.60) program, customers may identify up to three beneficiaries, and send up
to $1,500 per remittance, with a maximum of $3,000 over a 30-day period.
About $13.3 billion was wired to Mexico in
2003, and remittances to Latin America probably exceeded $30 billion last year,
according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Bank of America said remittances to Mexico
rose to $16.6 billion in 2007 and may reach $20 billion in 2007.
In June 2007 New York-based Citigroup Inc. (up
$0.09 to $45.18) issued what it called the first binational credit.
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