Checked Friday morning, 24 July: 300 pounds from the UK to Kenya, sent through six apps. Between the best regular price this week and the worst named one, the gap came to 2,538 shillings. That is about 14 pounds 72.
Here is what each one delivered.
| App | 300 GBP arrives as | Visible fee | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Instarem | KES 51,361.53 | £0 | Best regular price this week. No visible fee, and the exchange rate is under 1 percent below the real market rate. |
| Wise | KES 50,848.00 | £5.04 | The safe default. Real market rate, visible fee, arrives in seconds. About 514 shillings behind Instarem, or 3 pounds. |
| Remitly (regular) | KES 50,814.00 | £0 | No visible fee. The exchange rate takes just under 1 percent. |
| Skrill | KES 50,267.12 | £0 | No visible fee. The exchange rate takes nearly 3 percent. |
| Western Union | KES 50,169.44 | £2.99 | Sample is Tuesday’s number in the Wise cross-provider feed. Small visible fee, plus about 2 percent more in the rate. |
| Xoom (PayPal) | KES 48,823.60 | £2.99 | The least money arrived. Small visible fee, plus more than 4.5 percent in the exchange rate. |
| Remitly (first send only) | KES 51,069.00 | £0 | Promotional rate of 170.23 shillings to the pound. Only on your first transfer, and only on the first 600 pounds you ever send with them. |
Rates checked Friday 24 July 2026, morning UK time. Wise’s number is from Wise’s live rate feed at 04:04 UTC and its own cross-provider feed. Instarem, Skrill and Xoom are from that same comparison feed, all sampled between 03:26 and 03:31 UTC this morning. Western Union’s was last sampled by that feed on Tuesday 21 July at 15:40 UTC, so treat it as a Tuesday snapshot, not this morning’s. Remitly does not have a fresh sample in that feed today, so both Remitly numbers are taken directly from the Remitly UK site this morning. The independent mid rate from open.er-api.com is 173.15 shillings to the pound, within 0.5 percent of Wise’s, so the market rate here is clean. The Wise cross-feed does not split M-Pesa wallet delivery from bank deposit; you pick which one inside the app when you send. LemFi, Taptap Send, Sendwave and WorldRemit do not show a fresh price on this route in the Wise cross-feed today, so they are not in the table this week.
What to actually open
If you already have Instarem installed, or you do not mind setting up a new app, use Instarem. On 300 pounds this week it delivered the most shillings of any regular price, with no fee. That is about 3 pounds worth of shillings more than Wise.
If you want the safest, best-known option and you do not want to open a new app, use Wise. On 300 pounds this week Wise gave 514 shillings less than Instarem, which is about 3 pounds. The fee is on the screen, the exchange rate is the real market rate, and the money lands in seconds. For a lot of senders that plainness is worth the 3 pounds.
Do not open Xoom for this send unless there is no other option. The visible 2 pound 99 fee looks small. The full cost, once you add the fee and the gap to the real market rate, comes to about 16 pounds 78 on 300 pounds. That is 14 pounds 72 more than Instarem took, for the same 300 pounds sent, on the same morning.
Western Union sits between the two on the current sample, and their sample is 3 days old. Even at that Tuesday snapshot they were taking about 8 pounds 98 in total on 300 pounds.
Remitly’s regular price is close to Wise this week: 34 shillings behind, or about 20 pence. If you are already a Remitly customer, Instarem is still the better answer for this send.
If you are a new Remitly customer, their first-transfer rate of 170.23 shillings to the pound beats Wise by 221 shillings on 300 pounds, about 1 pound 30. It does not beat Instarem’s regular price. The offer is capped at the first 600 pounds you ever send with them, so it is not the plain right answer for this week’s send. If you were going to open Remitly anyway, take the first-transfer rate; if not, Instarem is still the number to beat.
For the whole route in one place, see how to send money to Kenya.
One thing the table cannot show
The table tells you how much of your 300 pounds arrived as shillings. It does not tell you what those shillings then cost to move around.
Most people sending to Kenya are sending to M-Pesa, not a bank account. The shillings land in the wallet and the household spends them from there. What is easy to miss is that Safaricom charges the recipient a small fee to move that money onward, and a bigger one to cash it out at an M-Pesa agent. On a 300-pound send that lands as about 51,000 shillings, sending it onward to another wallet costs 108 shillings, a little over 60 pence. Cashing it out at an M-Pesa agent costs 309 shillings, close to 1 pound 80.
Those are small numbers next to the 14 pounds 72 that a bad app took at the top of this piece. They are what the receiver actually pays, out of what arrived. If the household leaves the money in the wallet and spends it directly at the market or on a bill, most of that cost never comes out.
Airtel Money in Kenya recently raised its fees for sending to M-Pesa. Read plainly, that is a fee the recipient pays on money already in their Airtel wallet, not a fee on your UK send. If the person you send to uses Safaricom’s own M-Pesa, as most do, nothing has changed for them. If they use Airtel Money and forward the money onward to a Safaricom wallet, that hop just got more expensive on their side.
Next Friday: another country, another number.