One of Spain's largest banks wants to build a business wiring money from the United States to China, and it is looking to community banks here for help.
Through its wire service, the $474 billion-asset Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria handles more than 20 million remittances each year from the United States to Mexico and Latin America. It sees China as its next growth market, said Moises Jaimes, the head of Bancomer Transfer Services, the BBVA division that handles transfers.
Under a partnership BBVA recently started with Bank of China, immigrants living in the United States can use Bancomer Transfer Services to send money back home, with recipients collecting the money at one of Bank of China's 11,600 branches. (The United States has about 1.5 million Chinese immigrants. Only the Mexican immigrant population is larger here, according to census data.)
Mr. Jaimes said that for a fee of about $15, Chinese immigrants could wire the money through the U.S. Postal Service or through branches of BBVA's bank partners - the $34.5 billion-asset Harris Bank in Chicago (a Bank of Montreal unit) or the $427 billion-asset Wells Fargo & Co. of San Francisco.
"They will be able to go into any location where now they can do a wire from the U.S. to Mexico and do a wire from U.S. to China," Mr. Jaimes said.
He is also trying to persuade small banks - particularly those that cater to Chinese immigrants - to partner with BBVA. The banks would get a percentage of the fee.
"Definitely, we will approach Chinese-targeted banks," Mr. Jaimes said. "That is where we think we have a huge opportunity."
BBVA, which has not yet struck any deals with community banks, will probably meet some resistance from larger ones that already have their own money transfer services.
The $8 billion-asset UCBH Holdings Inc. in San Francisco offers remittances through its United Commercial Bank. Eleanor Chang, United Commercial's senior vice president of marketing, said the remittance business is crucial to building relationships in this market.
"If immigrants come to this country, we want their business," Ms. Chang said. "We want them to open an account and if they want to send money home, we want to provide that service for them."
UCBH partners with the Agricultural Bank of China, which has 31,000 branches. Ms. Chang would not say how many remittances it handles a year.
BBVA might find willing bank partners in urban banks that do not specifically target Chinese immigrants but have pockets of immigrants in their markets.
Thomas P. FitzGibbon Jr., the chief retail officer at the $5.3 billion-asset MB Financial Inc. in Chicago, said banks in markets like his might be interested in doing remittances but lack the experience or international relationships it takes.
Before the end of communism, Mr. FitzGibbon said, community banks in Chicago used to accept funds from Polish immigrants and wire them through the Chicago office of Poland's Pekao Bank. Relatives would pick up the money at Pekao branches in Poland.
BBVA started offering its services here in 2000. It handles an average of 1.6 million transactions a month, at about $10 each, for Mexican immigrants, and estimates they will send home $19 million this year through its service. It handles about 300,000 transactions a month for Latin American immigrants.
