Methodology

Our mission is to provide transparent, data-driven comparisons of international money transfer services. We believe people sending money abroad deserve to see the true cost of every transfer — including hidden exchange rate markups — so they can make informed choices.

This page explains exactly how we collect data, calculate costs, rank providers, and maintain editorial independence.

We collect exchange rate and fee data from 80+ providers every 6 hours using a combination of:

• Provider APIs: Where available, we use official APIs to pull live exchange rates and fee schedules programmatically. This is the most reliable and up-to-date source.
• Website scraping: For providers without public APIs, we use automated tools to extract quote data from their pricing pages and transfer calculators. We simulate real transfer requests to capture the rates a customer would actually see.
• Comparison aggregation: We cross-reference data from established comparison platforms to fill coverage gaps and validate our own findings.

Every data point includes a timestamp so you can see exactly when it was last updated. If a provider's data is stale or unavailable, we flag it clearly rather than showing potentially outdated figures.

Every incoming quote passes a set of automated integrity checks before it can influence a comparison ranking. A quote that fails one is still shown, after the ranked rows and labelled with the reason, but it is never ranked.

Beating the interbank rate: No legitimate retail money transfer provider can consistently offer a recipient more than the mid-market rate — doing so would mean the provider absorbs a loss on every transaction. If a quote's exchange rate beats our mid-market benchmark by more than a small tolerance, it is labelled as a likely promotional rate or data error and left unranked. Currencies with a parallel market, where the official rate understates what a dollar actually buys, are exempt from this check: on those corridors a provider can legitimately pay more than the official mid.

Stale data: Each quote row carries the time it was collected. A row more than 72 hours older than the freshest quote we hold means that provider's collection has stopped; it is shown with the date it was collected and left unranked, rather than competing with current rates.

Promotional and first-transfer rates: Some providers offer a significantly better rate for a new customer's first transfer, or for a limited promotional window. Where a source reports both, we store the promotional rate separately: the comparison rate is the standard one, and the promotion appears as a note beside it.

Placeholder quotes: A scraper that cannot retrieve a live quote for a corridor records nothing. It does not insert a fallback figure such as the mid-market rate with a zero fee, which would misrepresent the provider's cost.

Fee shape validation: A fee schedule can be tiered by amount or flat. Where a provider publishes both (TapTap Send does), the scraper reads both, and a schedule it cannot read is logged in the run rather than stored as a zero fee. Quotes collected before that fix are restated with the provider's published flat fee.

We currently track quotes and fees from the following providers, among others:

This list represents our core tracked providers. In total, we aggregate data from 80+ providers across 300+ corridors currency corridors including many regional and corridor-specific services. See our full provider directory for the complete list.

To calculate a provider's exchange rate markup, we compare their offered rate against the mid-market rate — the midpoint between buy and sell rates on global currency markets. This is widely considered the "real" exchange rate.

The markup percentage we publish for a provider on a given corridor is always the provider's rate measured against the mid-market rate, never against another provider's rate — comparing two retail rates against each other would obscure how much both deviate from the true market price.

The cost of an international transfer has two components, and looking at either one in isolation is misleading:

Our formula for ranking is straightforward:

This approach captures the full cost of the transfer in a single, comparable number. A provider with "zero fees" but a poor exchange rate will correctly rank below a provider that charges a small fee but uses the mid-market rate.

In our comparison tables, providers are ranked by receive amount — the total amount your recipient gets in the destination currency after all fees and exchange rate markups.

This ranking is:

• Corridor-specific:A provider that's cheapest for USD → INR may not be cheapest for GBP → EUR. Rankings change based on the currencies involved.
• Amount-specific: Some providers offer better rates for larger transfers. Rankings can shift based on the send amount.
• Time-specific: Exchange rates fluctuate throughout the day. Our data refreshes every 6 hours to keep rankings current.
• Not influenced by affiliate status: Whether or not a provider has a commercial relationship with us has zero effect on its ranking position.

Where two providers deliver receive amounts within 0.1% of each other — less than rates typically move between our updates — the provider with the higher customer rating is listed first. Indicative quotes (brokers that price by account manager rather than through a public calculator) and quotes flagged by the integrity checks above are shown after the ranked rows and never compete for the top position.

The receive amount is not a metric we invented. Two regulators already define the cost of a transfer the same way, and our tables compute what they require each provider to state.

Where those rules stop. Both govern what a provider must tell you about its own quote. Neither requires anyone to show you what a competitor would have delivered on the same transfer, so a fully compliant disclosure can still be the most expensive option on the corridor. Closing that gap is the whole job of this site: we take the figure the law already makes each provider state, and compute it across 80+ providers on the same corridor, at the same amount, at the same moment.

Two named measurements appear across the site. Both are computed from our own recorded provider quotes rather than from mid-market rates, and each has a page setting out its method and its limits.

SendScore rates 0–100 whether today is a good day to send on a corridor, from four weighted components. It is backward-looking and is not a forecast. It is available on the 206 corridors where enough providers compete to make a comparison meaningful; on single-provider corridors it is clamped and labelled as a reading rather than a comparison.

The Provider Consistency Index measures how often each provider actually delivers the most, across 124,549 provider-day observations on 214 corridors. A day counts only when at least two providers quoted — winning unopposed is not evidence.

Every dataset we publish, with its method and its limits, is indexed on the research hub. Provider-level cost averages are published separately as the Remittance Cost Index.

Beyond cost rankings, we evaluate providers across additional criteria to give users a complete picture:

Our side-by-side comparison articles (e.g., "Wise vs Remitly") evaluate two providers across multiple dimensions:

• Cost comparison: We run the same transfer amount through both providers across multiple corridors and compare receive amounts.
• Feature comparison: We compare supported countries, delivery methods, transfer speed, payment options, and app experience.
• Regulation: We verify and compare the regulatory status of both providers.
• Best-for verdict:Rather than declaring a single winner, we identify which provider is better for specific use cases (e.g., "better for small transfers," "better for cash pickup," "better for business payments").

We aim for accuracy, but we want to be transparent about the inherent limitations of our data:

• Exchange rates change continuously. Our 6-hour refresh cycle means there may be brief windows where the live rate on a provider's site differs from what we show.
• Some providers offer promotional rates, first-transfer discounts, or volume-based pricing that may not be reflected in our standard data collection.
• Delivery times are estimates provided by providers and may vary based on compliance checks, weekends, holidays, and payment methods.
• We cannot cover every provider in every country. If a provider is missing from our comparison, it may be because we have not yet added it to our data pipeline.

If you notice a discrepancy between our data and a provider's current pricing, please let us know so we can investigate and correct it.

We may earn a referral fee if you open an account with a provider through our links. This does not influence our rankings or comparisons. Providers cannot pay for higher placement, and affiliate relationships are never a factor in our data-driven rankings.

Our comparison tables are generated algorithmically based on the receive amount calculation described above. Editorial content such as reviews and guides is researched independently and reflects our honest assessment.

For full details, see our Editorial Policy.