Why is it so hard for foreign doctors to pay you in India?

Introduction

Every patient you send abroad earns you a referral fee. The doctor or hospital that treated them wants to pay it. The hard part is getting the money from their bank to yours.

For them, paying you means an international wire: forms, bank codes, fees, and sometimes a limit on how much they can send at all. For you, it means waiting days for money that arrives smaller than the invoice and is hard to match to a patient. So payments come late, get bundled into one transfer a month, and every one of them costs you a few percent.

This article explains why paying you is so hard today, where the time and money go, and how Pleny makes it as easy as a local transfer.

Key takeaways

• The problem: most doctors and hospitals abroad pay Indian facilitators by SWIFT wire, which is slow, costly and hard to send.
• Why it happens: a SWIFT wire passes through a chain of banks, and each one adds delay, checks and fees.
• The fix: with Pleny, they pay locally in their own country, and you get rupees the next day.

Why paying you is hard today

Most doctors and hospitals abroad pay Indian facilitators by SWIFT wire, the standard international bank transfer. It is hard on both sides.

For the doctor or hospital paying you:

• An international transfer form, with SWIFT codes and intermediary bank details to get right.
• A sending fee from their own bank, on top of what you are owed.
• In some countries, limits on how much an account can send abroad, and dollars that are hard to get at a fair rate.

For you:

• The money takes 2 to 5 working days to arrive, and you cannot see where it is in between.
• It lands lighter than the invoice, after fees and a forex markup along the way.
• It is hard to match: the amount is short, and the sender's name may not be the one you expected.

To see why, it helps to know what a SWIFT transfer actually is.

What is a SWIFT transfer?

A SWIFT transfer is an international bank transfer sent over the SWIFT network, the messaging system that more than 11,000 banks around the world use to send each other payment instructions.

SWIFT does not move money itself. It carries a message from one bank to another saying "pay this amount to this account". The money then moves through accounts that banks hold with each other, known as correspondent accounts.

How a SWIFT transfer reaches you

Say a hospital in Nigeria wires you a $10,000 referral fee:

1. The hospital's bank debits its account and sends a SWIFT payment message.
2. Correspondent banks step in when the hospital's bank has no direct relationship with yours. The payment may pass through one or more of them, often in New York for US dollars, each settling it on its own books.
3. Your bank in India receives the funds, checks the payment and its purpose code, and converts the dollars to rupees.
4. You see the INR credit in your account, and ask your bank for the inward remittance certificate.

Where do the delays and costs come from?

• Multiple hops: every bank in the chain processes the payment on its own schedule.
• Cut-off times and time zones: a payment that misses a bank's daily cut-off waits for the next working day, and weekends and holidays in any country on the route add more.
• Repeated compliance checks: each bank screens the payment independently, and any query can hold it for days.
• Deductions along the way: intermediary banks can take their own fee out of the amount, so you often get less than was sent.
• Forex markup: your bank converts at its own rate, which is usually worse than the mid-market rate.

The result is a transfer that usually takes 2 to 5 working days and arrives lighter than it left, with little visibility into where it is in the meantime.

How Pleny makes it easy

Pleny takes the chain of banks out of the payment. The doctor or hospital never sends an international wire.

1. You share a payment link. They see the amount, the fee and the exchange rate before paying.
2. They pay locally. They pay into a local account in their own country and currency, like any domestic bank transfer.
3. Our licensed partner brings it to India. It collects the money there and moves it into India in one step, instead of passing it from bank to bank.
4. You get rupees the next day. The money lands in your own bank account at the live mid-market rate, with their reference and a FIRA attached.

The same $10,000 referral fee, paid this way:

Why this is allowed

RBI licenses a type of payment company to do exactly this, called a Payment Aggregator (Cross Border), or PA-CB. Pleny works with a PA-CB licensed partner, and every payment enters India through an AD Category-I bank, one of the banks RBI authorises to handle foreign exchange. So each payment is a regular, recorded inward remittance, the same as a wire, without the chain of banks.

SWIFT vs Pleny

The difference is the route. A SWIFT wire hops from bank to bank across borders. With Pleny, the payer pays locally and one licensed channel brings the money into India.

A quick comparison

When is SWIFT still the right route?

SWIFT is still the right route for single payments above ₹25 lakh, because RBI caps payments on this route at ₹25 lakh per transaction. For anything larger, the payer can wire the amount directly to your bank account over SWIFT.

For everything below the cap, paying you through Pleny is faster, cheaper and easier for both sides.

Make it easy for doctors and hospitals abroad to pay you. Join the Pleny waitlist.

Frequently asked questions