Migrants sent over $500 billion home last year.

There are now 244 million people living in a country other than the one they were born in, according to migration figures from the United Nations.

Many of those people went overseas to find work, leaving their families behind. For a growing number of families, the money their relatives send home, known as remittances, is their main source of income.

Remittances in 2015 totalled an estimated $582 billion according to World Bank figures. Remittances have a huge impact in the countries that receive them. World Bank figures show that in 2015, remittances to Egypt were worth four times as much as revenues from the Suez Canal. In Nepal they make up nearly one-third of total GDP.

Read more at The World Economic Forum.

Fintech has the opportunity to revolutionise these remittance payments by significantly reducing transactional costs, making it easier and improving transparency and speed. At $500 billion, every percentage point retained puts another $5 billion into the pockets the migrants and their families.

In just a few days, one such fintech company will launch in the cross borders payment space, providing an alternative to the existing opaque, siloed and inefficient banking networks with a common global infrastructure and bringing new efficiencies to financial remittances by enabling near real-time settlements, improving visibility and reducing risk.

Flash Payments, a cutting edge fin-tech startup based in Sydney Australia, is engineered from the ground up to deliver intelligent foreign exchange transfer services, without hidden fees.

Using the innovative Ripple technology platform and XRP, Ripple's digital currency, Flash Payments delivers extraordinary transparency, speed and transactional control to users.

The technology tightly integrates payments messaging with funds settlements, allowing for unprecedented visibility and performance.

Flash Payments puts their customers in control. They can choose a target conversion rate, automate the international money transfer and track their currency transfer, like a package, from start to finish.

Flash Payments provides a lean high-performance foreign exchange transfer payment services that safely, efficiently and reliably provides users with a better customer experience.

Learn more about Flash Payments and sign up to benefit from their cutting-edge technology, great rates, transparency and control.