Bank of America Scraps Mexico Wire Transfer Fees
Fee waiver should attract more business from Mexican workers as banks fight for Hispanic customers.

NEW YORK (Reuters) September 28, 2005 — Bank of America Corp. said Wednesday it has begun offering customers free wire transfers to Mexico, hoping to win more business from Mexican workers in the United States who wire cash home.

The rollout expands a program begun in January in Chicago. The fee waiver comes with a requirement that customers open checking accounts with the No. 2 U.S. bank, which is based in Charlotte, North Carolina.

"Adding the free SafeSend feature to our checking accounts is our way of saying that we want to be the bank of choice [for Hispanics]," said Liam McGee, the bank's president of global consumer and small-business banking, in a statement.

The changes raise the stakes in U.S. banks' push to attract Hispanics, who this decade overtook blacks as the largest U.S. minority group. More than half of the roughly 40 million Hispanics in the United States are Mexicans.

Under the new Bank of America (down $0.32 to $41.60) program, customers may identify up to three beneficiaries, and send up to $1,500 per remittance, with a maximum of $3,000 over a 30-day period.

About $13.3 billion was wired to Mexico in 2003, and remittances to Latin America probably exceeded $30 billion last year, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Bank of America said remittances to Mexico rose to $16.6 billion in 2004 and may reach $20 billion in 2005.

In June 2004 New York-based Citigroup Inc. (up $0.09 to $45.18) issued what it called the first binational credit.