Ah, Georgia! This Transcaucasian country is famous for its unrivalled hospitality! For its amazing nature and kind and congenial people who call their homeland Sakartvelo! For the food that may possibly be the best in the world and the ever-present festive feeling!
However, this article will not be yet another list of must-visit places in Georgia; there are plenty of those online. Instead, we will focus on how to transfer money to Georgia quickly and efficiently if you are abroad or a ‘non-Georgian’ national who, nevertheless, has close connections with the country.
The estimates of how many Georgians live in Europe vary greatly. Still, most researchers believe between 200,000 and 300,000 Georgian nationals reside in the EU. Since 2012, almost 23% of the population have left Georgia due to the unstable economy, first of all, but also because Georgian nationals can enter and reside in the EU under a special simplified visa regime. Many people, especially youth, leave the country to find a job, get an education and improve their quality of life in general. Of those, many come back occasionally, and one can’t say they have left the country for good. Georgians have a powerful national identity, and Georgia always remains their homeland.
Contrary to popular belief, Russia is not the main migration destination for Georgians; the community in Europe in 2023 is substantially larger. Georgian nationals mostly settle down in Greece, Germany, Italy, Poland, and the UK. These people are either labour migrants, digital nomads, as the buzzword for this specific category goes, or students in European universities. All these people occasionally need to send money from Europe to Georgia. We review several ways to do it and their pros and cons.
There are several ways to transfer money from Europe to Georgia. The first, and the most ancient, is by cash delivered personally or by a courier. The courier could be a friend or someone who provides this kind of service professionally:
- This method is unsafe because the courier might turn out to be a conman or mugged on the way.
- It’s a complicated task since you need to find a courier, synchronise your schedules to give them cash, and wait until the money is delivered to the recipient.
- It’s expensive.
No one in their right mind will get involved in such a risky job without a proper reward. Remember The Transporter and Jason Statham’s smashing performance? Cash courier services are not cheap; depending on the amount, you will pay from several dozens to hundreds of euros. Wire transfer
This is one of the most popular ways to send money internationally. It’s performed via the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, known as SWIFT. A transfer like this requires much information about your account and that of your recipient, including BIC, a unique bank identifier comprising 11 or, in some cases, eight characters. The fees for such transfers start with €30 charged by the sender’s bank, but it’s not rare for the recipient’s bank in Georgia to also charge a commission. What does that mean? When sending a transfer, the user has no information on the exact amount their recipient gets in the end. Obviously, you can clarify this with the recipient’s bank, and that’s what you should do. But wouldn’t you agree it is a waste of time since banks may take several days to respond? On top of that, add up to a week for the transfer itself. This is not the best option if you need to send money urgently.
Besides cash and SWIFT transfers, there are payment systems like PayPal, Skrill, Neteller and others that offer international money transfer services. Each of these systems, however, requires both the sender and the recipient to be signed up, and that’s not always convenient, especially if you send money to your elderly relatives, who might not be tech-savvy enough to use such payment systems.
Crypto transfers
That’s another rather complicated scheme in which all the participants of a money transfer process must have a solid grasp of what they are doing. It’s necessary to deposit traditional fiat money to a crypto exchange account or a crypto p2p service. You can’t do that without paying a commission or an exchange rate margin. Then the process is reversed, and you sell cryptocurrency for fiat money, that is, in Georgia’s case, lari. Here, you are also charged a commission. Overall, you can lose from 8 to 12 per cent, which is a lot of money. And don’t disregard the transfer speed. All in all, it can be several days between your signing up with a crypto exchange and the recipient getting the money.
There is a certain type of service, however, that allows you to transfer money internationally within 5-7 minutes. These so-called money transfer systems do not require opening a bank account. One of those is Profee, an international money transfer service.
With Profee, you can send money from any country in the European Economic Area almost instantly – and with no commission if the recipient currency is the Georgian lari (GEL).
Thanks to the card-to-card technology, the delivery is almost instant. Money can be transferred from any Visa or Mastercard card issued in Europe to any bank card in Georgia. You can send money with Profee via the website or the iOS/Android app available from the App Store or Google Play. Available payment options include a card (need to know the number), Apple Pay and Google Pay, respectively, as well as SEPA transfers. Senders in Germany can also use Sofort.
Profee offers the best euro/lari rate thanks to its in-house online system that monitors exchange rates on the market. With this unique know-how, customers can be sure that they transfer money at the best possible rate at any given time. It’s an amazing technology!
Hundreds of thousands of people have already used Profee to send money from Europe to Georgia quickly and efficiently. On Trustpilot, a customer review platform, the service has one of the highest ratings on the market, 4.7/5. At the same time, Global Banking & Finance Review, an influential financial magazine, acknowledged Profee as the fastest growing money transfer service in Europe.
When deciding how to send money to Georgia, consider the charges, the exchange rate, the time a transfer takes and how secure it is. Go through all available options and select the one you feel is the most convenient and reliable.
