Say she is standing at the checkout screen of the transfer app, sending 300 pounds home this month. The app has picked local currency by default. Her family, on the other side, will do one of four things with the money.
- If she is sending to the Philippines, Kenya, India or most of stable Asia, they will spend the money. The app’s price is fine. Send local.
- If she is sending to Turkey, Ghana or Egypt, they will convert what she sent into dollars almost the day it lands, because holding local costs them money as they wait. Sending local means paying for the swap twice. It matters.
- If she is sending to Nigeria, what she picks in the app does not decide the currency any more, because since May 2026 the family gets naira, full stop. What she can do outside the app is different, and further down the piece.
- If she is paying a bill quoted in dollars, her child’s school in Lagos, her landlord in Buenos Aires, a private university invoice, the app was never the right tool. The invoice already made the choice for her.
This piece is a plain map of those four situations. Find yours, and send the right way for it. (If you have moved to the UK and are trying to bring your own savings across, not send money to family, you are in a different piece: read moving your savings to the UK instead. This one is for the sender.)
Why any of this matters
The app quotes its price at the official rate of the country the money is going to. In most countries the official rate is the rate the family sees when they take the cash out. It is fine. In a few countries the official rate and the real rate people trade at are different numbers, sometimes very different. In those places a family sitting on dollars in hand can reach the better rate. A family sitting on local currency the app just delivered cannot. And in some countries the local currency is losing value quickly enough that any local balance is a countdown to a haircut, no matter what the rate says today.
None of this is a trick. It is how families in these countries have always managed the money they earn abroad. The apps do not advertise it because the apps sell local delivery. The comparison sites do not surface it because their widgets can only compare the prices the apps quote. The banks warn you off the informal side and quietly take more on the formal side.
In this piece, the hard currency is the dollar because that is what the market has settled on. For a few readers, the euro is the more natural choice. The logic is the same.
Philippines, Kenya, India and the rest of stable Asia: send local
If your family is in Philippines, Kenya, India, Vietnam or Sri Lanka, this is your section and it is short.
Send local. Do not overthink it. On Kenya through M-Pesa, Wise keeps somewhere around half a percent above the real exchange rate, the one you see on Google. On India and the Philippines you are looking at roughly one to two percent all-in on typical family amounts. Those are the numbers that let Wise or a direct-to-wallet app like Sendwave land the money in the family’s account in minutes with almost nothing skimmed on the way.
Sending dollars into these countries first, only to have the family walk into a foreign exchange bureau at their end and swap them into pesos or shillings, adds a second charge you did not need to pay. If a friend has told you to hold dollars for Manila because “the peso is losing value,” check for yourself. It is not falling fast enough for the double swap to earn its keep. That advice was for someone thinking of a different country.
Turkey, Ghana, Egypt: the family holds dollars anyway
Some families convert local currency into dollars the moment it arrives, because their local currency is losing value fast enough that any balance held in it is worth less next month than this month.
Turkey, Ghana and Egypt are the clearest examples in mid 2026. The Turkish lira has lost roughly 15 to 20 percent against the dollar over the past twelve months, in a slow managed drift the central bank does not try to fight. The Ghanaian cedi went from around 10.95 to the dollar in January 2026 to about 12.25 by July, after a very strong 2025. The Egyptian pound sits near 50 to the dollar and the gap between the official rate and the parallel market rate has narrowed but has not disappeared.
The question in these countries is not whether the family should hold dollars. They already do. The question is whether it is cheaper for you to hand them dollars or for them to buy the dollars themselves at their end, out of the local money the app delivered.
Almost every time, the answer is: send local. Let the family buy the dollars locally. That was going to happen anyway. Trying to send dollars into Turkey, Ghana or Egypt at family-transfer amounts is more expensive than sending local, because each stage costs you: your bank charges to wire dollars, the receiving bank charges to receive dollars, the family then pays another fee to move the dollars into a form they can actually spend. That stack of small charges beats the local exchange fee the app avoided.
The one exception is when the family has an ongoing bill priced in dollars. If they do, you are not in this section. You are three sections down.
Nigeria: what changed in May 2026
Nigeria is a case of its own in 2026, and it is important to get it right.
Since 1 May 2026, the Central Bank of Nigeria has required every money transfer app operating into the country to pay recipients only in naira. Wise, Remitly, Sendwave, WorldRemit, MoneyGram, Western Union, TapTap Send, all of them. Some of these apps used to have USD payout options into Nigerian dollar accounts; Sendwave ran a USD cash pickup at Access, Zenith and Fidelity branches. That is over. The apps now deliver naira, at the official rate the central bank publishes daily. Our plain explainer of the settlement rule has the full mechanics.
That does not mean sending dollars to Nigeria is over. It means the app is not the way. Two routes still work.
The first is a bank wire into a domiciliary account. Your bank in London or New York sends dollars through the SWIFT network to your family’s dollar account at GTBank, Access, Zenith or First Bank. It arrives in about three to five working days, in dollars, into an account that can hold them. This is the right route for large sums: a lump for a house deposit, a semester of university fees, a medical bill. It is a poor route for a monthly 300 pounds.
The outgoing wire is 25 to 45 dollars on your side. Each bank the wire passes through takes another 10 to 25 dollars. The Nigerian receiving bank takes its own fee. On 500 dollars that stack is 12 to 20 percent of the money. On 5,000 dollars it is closer to 2 percent. The dollar wire route works when the amount is large enough that a fixed fee stack disappears against it.
The second route is the naira the app already sent, converted at their end. If the family wants dollars, they can take the naira the app delivered and buy dollars at a bureau de change in Lagos or Abuja, or from someone they know who trades in cash. This is the informal exchange route Nigerian families have run for two generations. It is legally grey in most of what it does and legally clean in some, and this piece will not tell you whether to use it or avoid it.
What this piece can say plainly is that the central bank’s naira-only rule does not stop the family reaching a better rate at their end. It only means the app is not the vehicle any more.
If a service tells you it can pay your family in dollars through a card or a wallet, check it against the current central bank rule before you send. What existed twelve months ago on that shelf is not what exists today.
When the invoice made the choice
A different set of readers is not sending money to a family who will spend it. They are paying a bill quoted in dollars. That bill decides the currency for you.
The clearest example is Buenos Aires. Since Argentina’s 2024 rent-law change, roughly nine in every ten leases in the neighbourhoods a foreigner is likely to rent in, Palermo, Recoleta, Belgrano, are written in US dollars. The landlord takes cash dollars, or a wire in dollars, or dollars bought through a local broker. She does not want pesos. If you are paying her rent from abroad, dollars need to arrive in a form she accepts.
The same shape shows up in a private school fee in Lagos billed in dollars, a Nigerian bank asking for USD proof of funds for a visa application, a private university in Accra invoicing in dollars, and some hospital bills across the continent. In every case the app is not the tool. A bank wire into a dollar account that you or a family member controls is. That account then pays the invoice directly, and the school or the landlord or the hospital sees a bank-transfer receipt in the currency they asked for.
If this is you, ignore the app comparison. Talk to a bank about the wire.
A note on Argentina, because it changed. Until April 2025 the country had two very different rates: an official rate and a “blue” street rate that was often 40 or 50 percent better. That gap was the reason many families in the Argentine diaspora asked for dollars. Since Milei’s government lifted most currency controls, the blue rate has closed to within a few percent of the official one. The parallel-rate argument for Argentina has mostly gone. The dollar case for Argentina in 2026 is not the street rate; it is the invoice.
Lebanon: dollars are already the currency
Lebanon does not fit the boxes above.
After the 2019 crisis and the years of collapse that followed, the Lebanese pound has been unified around one rate, roughly 89,500 to the dollar, and daily commerce in Beirut has quietly gone on in dollars for a long time. Cash dollars, mostly. Bank dollars, the “lollars” that people sometimes had to accept at a heavy discount, are a separate story that mainly hurt the people who had them.
If your family is in Lebanon, the answer is dollars, ideally in a form they can hold as cash or spend directly. That is not because of a rate arbitrage. It is because the local currency has already, in practice, been replaced.
What you risk when you send dollars
Sending dollars is not automatically safer than sending local.
Cash dollars kept at home can be stolen. A dollar bank account can be frozen, or can face documentation the family does not have on hand, or can quietly stop working when the central bank changes a rule (Nigeria, again). Buying dollars from a bureau de change is legally grey in most of the countries this piece has named, and outright illegal in a few of them. A family that suddenly starts moving large sums of dollars into an account draws a kind of attention that a family receiving the monthly naira does not.
None of this makes dollars a bad answer. It means the dollar answer has a bill on the back of it that the naira answer does not. It belongs in the picture before you commit.
The one-line answer for each of you
If you are sending to the Philippines, Kenya, India, Vietnam or Sri Lanka: send local. Use the app. Do not overthink it.
If you are sending to Turkey, Ghana or Egypt: send local. Let the family buy dollars at their end. Only use a bank wire if you are sending a large sum for a specific dollar bill.
If you are sending to Nigeria: send naira through the app for anything monthly. Use a bank wire to a domiciliary account for large one-off sums. The family can buy dollars locally with the naira if they want them.
If you are paying a bill priced in Argentine dollars, Nigerian dollars, or any invoice in USD: use a bank wire. The app is not the tool.
If you are sending to Lebanon: dollars, ideally in a form the family can hold as cash or spend directly.
Rules move. If a central bank changes something that shifts one of these answers next month, we will tell you here.