Businesses Competing To Attract Filipinos Sending Money Home

Ana Pare, a nurse, waited in a line stretching from the counter to the door at PNB Remittances in Morton Grove on a recent morning.  She had another errand to run, but she was willing to wait.  Like many Filipinos, she regularly sends money to her family back in the Philippines.

Pare is not alone.  In October, the World Bank estimated that remittances to the Philippines from foreign workers this year would top $21.3 billion, a rise of 7.8 percent from 2009.  The Philippines trails only China, India and Mexico in the amount of money sent by citizens working overseas. The competition for their business is intensifying in places like Niles. 

"If (Filipinos) have family they left behind, they have a sense of responsibility to send back," Pare said.

The increase in remittances this year doesn't surprise Ralph Tobias, one of four agents at the Metro Remittance Center in Niles.   The company is one of several in the north suburbs that sends remittances to the Philippines, transferring money between customers in the U.S. and their families in the Philippines for a fee. Customers can bring cash, or have the money transferred directly from their bank accounts. 

Their clients are almost exclusively first- or second- generation Filipino immigrants, says Tobias. Filipinos make up around 5 percent of the population in north suburbs like Niles, Morton Grove and Skokie, according to data from the 2000 Census.

September to December is the busiest time of year, Tobias said, and business this year is good.  He says Metro Remittance has see a rise in both the amount of money and the number of transfers sent by workers back to the Philippines in 2010.

That money seldom comes in large amounts.  The Metro Remittance branch in Niles transfers around $32,000 a day and $200,000 to $300,000 a week to bank accounts across the Philippines.   Although some customers transfer thousands of dollars at a time, many transactions are a just few hundred dollars each.

The money often helps family back home struggling make ends meet.

"My sister's over there, getting papers to come here," Tobias says.  In the meantime, his family sends her about $200 a week to help her meet expenses.

But if the total amount of money flowing in to the Philippines from overseas workers has gone up, so has the competition among businesses sending that money.

Anjee Recto, the branch supervisor at the PNB Remittance Center in Morton Grove says business has slowed there recently.

"The reason is obvious," Recto says.  "Unemployment and competition.  There is much more competition."

"There's four times the competition than when we first did it," agrees Marissa Carido, President of Orient Star Shipping in Skokie.

Her father started Orient Star in 1992 in Queens, New York, and Carido and her husband opened a Skokie branch in 2001.  Orient Star is an agent of Sigue, a large remittance company based in California, but its primary focus is on "balikbayan" boxes. Balikbayan, or "return home" boxes, are large cardboard boxes packed with staple goods and sent back home to relatives in the Philippines. 

"You want to share with people in the Philippines what you have in America," says Alex Cirera, owner of Cirera Express Shipping in Niles. "Things like shampoo, chocolate [and] American brand food are expensive there." 

Like Carido, Cirera is a remittance agent, but the bulk of his business lies in the boxes.  He estimates the average value of goods in a typical balikbayan box at no more than $200.  The boxes can cost anywhere from $35-$75 to ship, depending on the company and the destination in the Philippines.

A wave of balikbayan companies sprang up across the U.S. in the '80s and '90s to cater to Filipino workers.

"There was such a need because of so many OFWs," says Carido.

 Many OFWs, or Overseas Filipino Workers, often couldn't afford to return to the Philippines for years at a time, and while they could send money to help their families, many found it impersonal.

"We become the bridge for them," Carido says. "It's not just a box.  They're not just materials, but connections."

Just as with remittances, the number of boxes customers send varies, with a significant portion sent between September and November in order to arrive for Christmas.  

"There are those who just ship one box per year, some one box per month," Carido says.

When asked if she ever saw a time when companies that transfer money or balikbayan would be obsolete, Carido shook her head. 

"There will always be OFWs, and there will always be a need for goods."