Sending home the bacon

British company White Eagle has begun offering low-cost money transfers and telephone services for Poles working in Great Britain. The firm's offer includes low international call rates and a general purpose Mastercard card with an option to "send money home."

White Eagle wants to secure 40-50,000 clients by the end of 2008 and 100,000 by the end of 2009.

"We identified a niche market among the Polish community [in the UK]," White Eagle's founder and CEO Warren Hardy told the press, noting that he expected the niche to grow along with the Polish community in the UK.

The number of Poles in Britain has reached almost two million people, according to the company's data, although official figures from the British Home Office showed that around 400,000 Polish people have migrated to work in Britain since Poland's EU accession. Altogether, Poles sent as much as zł.5 billion to their home country from 2004-2007, but the high cost of international money transfers was a common complaint, according White Eagle's research.

The company's expectations could be challenged, however, since the number of Poles migrating to the UK seems to be dropping. About 38,000 Poles registered under the UK Worker Registration Scheme in the third quarter of 2007, the lowest number by far since Poland's EU accession in 2004. Moreover, the percentage of Poles working in the UK and Ireland who plan to return home reached 12 percent this year - twice as many as the year before, according research by the Interactive Institute of Market Research.

White Eagle will launch services for immigrants from other CEE countries and wants to enter the Polish market within 12 months, offering money transfers for people receiving social benefits.

There is great potential for low-cost money transfers since growing intra-European mobility will stimulate price reductions in the market, Ryszard Petru, an analyst from BPH bank noted. Błażej Lepkowski, from the Gdańsk Institute for Market Research (IBnGR) agreed. "So far, international money transfers have been too expensive," he said.