Using remithome for
Business Payments to the Philippines

This issue of our newsletter focuses on remithome members who use our online money transfer service to make business payments to the Philippines. Unlike the majority of our customers who use remithome primarily to send money to loved ones, our business customers use remithome to pay suppliers, employees, and contractors in the Philippines.

The article below is the first in series of articles on Business in the Philippines. Our initial article is on outsourcing, a very important sector of the Philippine economy and one in which many of remithome’s business customers participate.

The Ask remithome section describes how our money transfer service is ideally suited to paying outsourced personnel in the Philippines.

To find out how remithome can meet the money transfer needs of your business, click here to complete a Business Account Information Request Form.

 Outsourcing – Why the Philippines?
First in a Series of Articles on Business in the Philippines

Did you know that the Philippines is an important center for outsourcing, especially from the United States?

What is outsourcing?

Outsourcing involves contracting out a business function to an external provider, either domestically or internationally. For U.S. companies, the Philippines is often a major outsourcing destination.

What business functions can be outsourced?

Many business functions can be outsourced and, with advances in web-based applications and telecommunications, outsourcing to a different country (sometimes called Offshoring or Offshore Outsourcing) has become more common.

Where an entire business function such as Customer Service or Finance & Accounting is outsourced, this is called Business Process Outsourcing (BPO). However, outsourcing can also be done on a much smaller scale. For example, a small business might hire just one person to work as a Virtual Assistant, doing various office functions.

Why outsource to the Philippines?

When businesses look to outsource functions, they look for a combination of factors that include cost-effectiveness, reliability, and skill set. The Philippines offers competitive labor rates, a stable telecommunications infrastructure, and an educated English-speaking workforce. This makes the Philippines an attractive outsourcing destination, particularly for U.S. companies.

The Philippines has a large skilled labor force that meshes well with business outsourcing needs. Not only does the country produce nearly 500,000 college graduates each year, but large numbers are in business-related, engineering, and information-technology (IT) programs. And, as described in our March 2010 newsletter, these graduates are English speaking.

Outsourcing to the Philippines began in the 1990s with call centers and low-value-added business processes such as email response services. However, outsourcing growth over the last decade has expanded to higher-value activities such as web design, software development, engineering, finance, animation, legal services, medical transcription, and architectural services.