According to various estimates, over 5 million Kazakh people live outside Kazakhstan. Only 700,000 of those, however, are the diaspora because the rest reside close or often even next to Kazakhstan’s borders, even if not in the country.
The largest Kazakh communities can be found in France, Sweden, the UK, and Germany. The majority of European Kazakhs have settled down in Germany. The reason behind this is the emigration of German descendants that has been ongoing since the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
As a result, in Kazakhstan, the number of ethnic Germans has more than halved over the last 20 years, down to around 180,000 people. Of those, almost everyone has relatives in Germany; therefore, the family and cultural relationships between the two countries are especially strong compared to other European countries. However, not only repatriated Germans but many other Europeans still have families and friends back in Kazakhstan. For many of them, being able to send money from abroad to the Republic is a matter of utmost importance. How to send money to Kazakhstan and minimise or even avoid losses? What ways to send money transfers from Europe to Kazakhstan are available today? You will find answers to these key questions in this article.
Sending money to Kazakhstan with a courier
It may seem that this type of money transfers to Kazakhstan is a thing of the past. Indeed, in the early 1990s or even 2000s, when the Internet was still in its infancy, people preferred to move cash across the border personally or with the help of trusted friends or family. At some point, professional cash couriers had taken up the service. Today, however, this is a rather obsolete phenomenon compared to modern money transfer services. It comes as no surprise: it takes a lot of time, costs a lot of money, and is dangerous and utterly inconvenient.
You need to first find a courier by means of sifting through chat rooms, asking for recommendations from friends, and so on. Then you both need to arrange a meeting in person, which can be a challenge, especially if the money must be sent to Kazakhstan asap, which is most probably the case.
Cash courier services cost a lot. When it comes to cash transfers, their appetites beat even those of banks.
Sending money to Kazakhstan with a courier is a risky business. It is common for fraudsters to use social engineering to pass as couriers. They may disappear without a trace as soon as they have received the money, often from several clients at once. But even if your courier is real, there is a risk of them being mugged or robbed by criminals. There are no guarantees.
P2P crypto transfers
If you google the ways to transfer money to Kazakhstan, there is a growing number of results with articles about and websites of cryptocurrency exchanges. Crypto is the latest trend that many have already heard of. Let’s have a look at the options to transfer money with crypto. First, you need to deposit traditional fiat money with a cryptocurrency exchange by purchasing, for example, USDT stablecoins pegged to the US dollar. The commission fee can be up to 3%, depending on the conversion method.
Conversely, there is the reverse process of getting your money out of the crypto exchange.
The money can be transferred from the exchange directly to a bank account. You convert USDT to euros which you then send from the cryptocurrency exchange to your account. But how do you transfer money to a bank card in Kazakhstan? Well, you can’t do that. You can only withdraw money from a crypto exchange to your bank account. Why? These are the anti-money laundering rules. So, this is not a viable way to send funds to Kazakhstan from Europe. Therefore, let’s explore another option, which is peer-to-peer transfers. The majority of cryptocurrency exchanges have at least one and sometimes more P2P trading platforms. If you choose to get USDT for euros, look for peers willing to buy your USDT for the Kazakh tenge and send the fiat money to your recipient’s bank account or card in Kazakhstan.
Every cryptocurrency exchange user wants to make some cash, which is normal. Therefore, each seller or buyer sets their own USDT/tenge exchange rate, which may differ significantly from the official USD/tenge rate and not necessarily to your advantage. As a result, you lose at least 3% on P2P withdrawals and the total commission fees amount to 6% or more, which is a lot. In addition, the speed of transfer is very low. There are multiple steps to be taken which require some specific knowledge. The option of crypto transfers is rather inconvenient and takes much time and often money.
SWIFT wire transfers
There is another way to send money to Kazakhstan. You can do this as a bank transfer or a wire transfer performed via what is known as SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. To send a SWIFT transfer, you need to provide a lot of information about your recipient and their bank, including the recipient’s full name and address, the name, address, and SWIFT/BIC code of the recipient’s bank as well as their account number. It might not seem a big deal, but if you are sending money to people of older generations, for them to get you all the details you need for an international money transfer might be a challenge, to say the least.
The recipient is lucky if they can fill out the details through their online banking platform. But the banking services in Europe lag behind compared to some other parts of the world. German banks are notorious for being conservative. They are quite peculiar, just like the system in general, which is three-pillar. It comprises private commercial banks, public savings banks, and cooperative banks, and each approaches money transfers differently, especially when it comes to sending funds internationally.
Some other drawbacks of wire transfers include:
It may take a SWIFT transfer up to a week to be completed.
There is a chance that the transfer is not delivered at all in case the financial control or anti-money laundering authorities feel suspicious about something, either on the sending or receiving side.
Many banks charge commission fees which may be as high as dozens of euros, comprising a flat fee and a share of the transfer amount. And not only that! The banks often charge customers for incoming SWIFT transfers, which should be clarified with the recipient’s bank in Kazakhstan. Therefore, the sender is basically unable to know the exact amount to be deposited to the recipient’s account.
Most users find transferring funds with banks or cryptocurrency rather inconvenient, and they look for less bothersome options to send money directly to a card in Kazakhstan.
Profee money transfers
Hence, let’s look on the bright side! There is, in fact, a fast and reliable way to send money to Kazakhstan without having to pay a fortune in fees. That’s international money transfer services that do not require opening a bank account, such as Profee.
With Profee, you can instantly send money from any Visa or Mastercard card issued in Europe, including in Germany, to a card issued by any bank in Kazakhstan, such as Kaspi, Jusan, Halyk, Fortebank, Otbasy bank, Altyn-i, Freedom Bank, and Home Credit Bank among others.
You can conveniently transfer money both on the iOS/Android app and www.profee.com and seamlessly switch between the platforms.
Profee has a meticulously designed and, therefore, user-friendly interface. You can always check the converter for the total amount your recipient gets in the selected currency. Such an option is a huge advantage over wire transfers, where you never know the amount that ends up on the recipient side of the financial transaction. There are no hidden ‘extra’ fees and charges. At the same time, the tenge conversion rate for the euro or any other European currency is the best on the market thanks to Profee’s unique in-house monitoring system that tracks rates used by currency exchanges and competitors and offers users the best rate for any given transfer.
Here is how you can efficiently send money to Kazakhstan:
· Visit Profee.com or download the Profee app from the App Store or Google Play
· Sign up, confirm your phone number, and provide some basic details such as your full name, email address, nationality, and residential address in Europe
· Next, fill out the details of your transfer: destination country, debit and credit currencies, amount, details of recipient’s bank card in Kazakhstan and your bank card (it must be issued by a European bank)
· Confirm and send the transfer.
By the way, now you can send up to EUR 1,000 immediately after the signup and without the need to prove your identity. To send more than that, say, up to 30.000 EUR a year, you only need to complete a very simple identity verification procedure. It usually takes about 10 minutes, and in a couple of hours, your limit on international money transfers to Kazakhstan will be increased.
In this article, we have described several popular options for sending money from Europe to Kazakhstan and give you some tips on selecting the one that’s best for you. We hope you find them useful, but keep in mind that the final decision is yours.
