Edunology - Saumya Aggarwal

India to Singapore Life Begins | Remitting money from Singapore to India

Well, life begins in Singapore for me. Internal transfer to look into different segment of clients and geography within Bloomberg. Singapore has been on a high start in 2015 and since I have moved I have found ways to work on social issues here which I intend to post subsequently.

Apart from finding houses, one of first thing I had to do was to remit money in India to take care of my last bills there. I checked with few NRIs here and did lot of research online, none could give me better answer than DBS or Indian Bank ICICI. I was about to go for obvious choice of DBS as ICICI has hidden charges in SGD for transfer. However I decided to do last round of check, SGD to INR rate given by many banks were way different, here is my summary.

Axis Bank: 44.9
DBS: 45.33
HDFC: 45.31
ICICI: 45.58
Remit2India: 45.45
SBI SP: 45.37
Yes Bank: 45.17 + 0.50
Kotak: 45.60

Honestly, when I loved above I could not find out why Axis Bank is even competing. DBS does remit the money instantly which is best among all offerings. ICICI on other side has transfer charges which makes it incompetent to other banks. SBI being government bank was out of list as I do not expect good service, then my eyes were caught by new generation Indian banks Kotak and Yes. Kotak upon further research made me feel that rates were different however due to promotion Yes Bank turned out to be best. I immediately filled the service application and understood they use Remit2India/Timesofmoney engine only but somehow give better rates than them. Relationship manager was quick to respond however filling the form was a pain as they did not take Singapore number correctly and IT usability was all of the place of the website. Finally the money got
transferred successfully and I am happy to have used Yes Bank.

Please share your insights on getting best exchange rates for remitting money to India.