How We Review Providers

We don't rely on provider marketing materials or self-reported data. Our review process is hands-on and data-driven:

1. Data collection: We pull live exchange rates and fee data from provider APIs and websites every 6 hours. This gives us a continuously updated picture of what each provider actually charges.
2. Product testing: Our team creates accounts with each provider, initiates test transfers, and evaluates the end-to-end user experience — from sign-up to delivery confirmation.
3. Regulatory verification:We independently verify each provider's regulatory status by checking registration numbers against the public registries themselves — the FCA Financial Services Register in the UK, the FinCEN MSB registrant search in the US, and ASIC's registers in Australia — rather than taking a provider's own licence page at its word. A licence proves a provider is supervised; it says nothing about whether the transfer is cheap, which is why regulatory status is a gate in this process and not a scoring criterion below.
4. Scoring: Each provider is scored across five weighted criteria (detailed below) to produce an overall rating from 1.0 to 5.0.
5. Ongoing monitoring: Reviews are not static. We re-evaluate providers when our data detects material changes to fees, coverage, speed, or regulatory status.

SendMoneyCompare earns a referral fee from some providers when you reach them through our links, as the footer of every page says. That fee plays no part in where a provider appears: comparison tables are ordered by what your recipient receives for the amount you send, from quotes we collect every six hours, and where two payouts are within 0.1% of each other the provider with the higher customer rating is listed first. A provider that pays us nothing is ranked by the same rule, and the criteria below are applied to every provider whether or not we earn from it.

Paid placement exists, and it is labelled. TapTap Send pays us when a reader signs up, and the blocks that promote it say “Sponsored” and sit outside the comparison's order, never as a row moved up within it. When you click through to another provider, a page before that provider's site may offer TapTap Send next to your choice, with its quote for the same route; continuing to the provider you picked stays the first option.

A quote that looks wrong is not dropped. One that cannot be a standing price is shown after the ranked rows, with a label saying why, and is never ranked:

• It beats the mid-market rate, which is what a promotional rate or a data error looks like
• Its fee or markup is so far outside any real price that a misread field is the likelier explanation
• It was collected more than 72 hours before our freshest quote, which means that provider's collection stopped
• It is an indicative rate from a broker that prices by account manager rather than through a public calculator

Separately, a provider can be withheld from provider lists by an editorial decision; its review page stays online. The full rules are on our methodology page.

Financial services change frequently — providers adjust fees, launch new corridors, update apps, and change regulatory status. We keep reviews current through:

• Automated data collection every 6 hours for exchange rates and fees
• Periodic re-testing of the user experience (sign-up, transfers, customer support)
• Monitoring regulatory registries for status changes or enforcement actions
• Reader feedback — if you notice something out of date, let us know