You tried to send the money the normal way and the app asked for a bank account number the recipient does not have. There is no account. There is a grandmother in a village, an aunt whose branch closed, a brother who has never opened one. The money can still reach them, and which route works depends on the recipient, not on the app you like. There are three shapes.
The three shapes of no-bank recipient
They have a mobile phone with a wallet on it. M-Pesa in Kenya. GCash or Maya in the Philippines. JazzCash, Easypaisa or Sadapay in Pakistan. bKash in Bangladesh. MTN MoMo or Airtel Money across most of sub-Saharan Africa. Opay, PalmPay or Moniepoint in Nigeria (though Nigeria has its own cash-pickup rule; see below). This is the fastest and cheapest route, and it is the one to reach for first. The money arrives in the wallet in minutes and stays there until they need to touch it. Cashing it out at an agent has its own fee, walked through in what it costs to turn the mobile-money SMS into cash.
Sender-side apps that pay direct into these wallets include Wise, Sendwave (strong across West and East Africa), Remitly and WorldRemit. Wise does no cash pickup anywhere, so do not reach for it if the recipient will need physical cash; it is the app for the wallet route only.
They can travel to an agent booth and hold a photo ID. Cash pickup. The physical networks are still large: MoneyGram, Western Union, Ria, and the West Africa specialist Wave. Remitly runs the biggest digital-first cash-pickup network, at about 490,000 locations across more than 130 countries; WorldRemit runs cash pickup in the Philippines through BDO, Cebuana, PS Bank and M Lhuillier. Cash pickup usually costs more than the wallet route and requires a trip to an agent, but it is the one that works when the recipient has no phone wallet at all.
They live somewhere with no wallet in reach and cannot travel. This is the hardest case and there is no clever answer for it. The route is either courier home-delivery (Remitly offers this in the Philippines, Vietnam and the Dominican Republic; some Wave agents in West Africa do the same) or a trusted family member with a wallet who can cash out and physically hand the money over. Both add a link where the money passes through a person, and can be delayed or short. Name that risk to the person you are sending on behalf of, before you send.
What the recipient must have on the day
For a mobile-money wallet: the wallet must be registered in the recipient’s own name. Send to their number, not someone else’s “just to try”. A wrongly-registered wallet is a lost payment. In Kenya, the M-Pesa account is tied to the Safaricom SIM the recipient already holds. In Pakistan, JazzCash, Easypaisa and Sadapay each need the recipient’s CNIC and a Pakistan mobile number, and the sender-side app will ask for the recipient’s IBAN, which the wallet issues at signup.
For cash pickup: the recipient walks in with a government photo ID and the transfer reference number. Nigeria accepts international passport, driver’s licence, National Identity Card, or the INEC Permanent Voters Card (PVC). India accepts Aadhaar, PAN, passport or voter ID. Kenya accepts the national ID or a passport. Pakistan accepts the CNIC. The recipient must be able to travel to the agent booth during opening hours and present the ID in person.
One rule sits above the rest: the name you put on the transfer must match the name on the recipient’s ID exactly. MoneyGram and Western Union both refuse to release cash for even a missing middle name, a hyphen difference, or a shortened first name. If your grandmother’s ID says “Adaeze Grace Okonkwo” and you sent to “Grace”, the agent will refuse to pay. This is the most common denial at the counter. Use the ID name, not the family name.
The two rules that catch UK senders
Nigeria. Since a Central Bank of Nigeria directive of 31 January 2024, cash pickup at MoneyGram, Western Union and every other approved operator in Nigeria is capped at the naira equivalent of $200 per transaction. Anything above that must be paid to a bank account, not in cash. Payout is in naira only, at the prevailing Nigerian foreign-exchange market rate. If your recipient in Nigeria has no bank account and you are sending £150 or more, cash pickup is not a route. The wallet route (Opay, PalmPay, Moniepoint) is what works, and so does opening a basic wallet with any of them. See the CBN naira-settlement rule change for the fuller shape of the same rule.
India. Under the Reserve Bank of India’s Money Transfer Service Scheme (MTSS), cash pickup to a recipient without a bank account is capped at ₹50,000 per transaction. Anything above that is paid by cheque, payment order, or direct to a bank account. Each recipient is also capped at 30 transfers per year, and each transaction is capped at USD 2,500. If you are sending to a family member in India who does not have an account and the send is above ₹50,000 (about £460), plan for the extra step.
The pickup window closes
If the money is sent for cash pickup and the recipient does not turn up, the transfer sits at the operator for a limited time. MoneyGram holds for 90 days and then the transfer expires; after that MoneyGram has no obligation to disburse. Western Union holds between 30 and 90 days, depending on the country. Ria sits in the same range. The money is not lost when the window ends: as sender you can still request a refund or renew the transfer, but you have to act. A cash-funded MoneyGram refund requires the sender to walk back into an agent with ID. Card and bank-funded refunds take three to ten business days to land.
If the recipient never collects and the sender never claims, the money eventually goes to the state as unclaimed property. Set a note in the phone the day you send.
If it went wrong at the counter
The fix goes to the sending app, not to the receiving agent. MoneyGram, Western Union and Ria all let the sender amend the recipient name from the app (typically free before pickup), extend the hold, or cancel and refund. The receiving agent has no authority to override a name mismatch, an expired ID, or a compliance hold. Do it from the app you sent from, and do it before the window closes.
For the wider set of receiver-side questions once the money has landed, Boki’s arrival coverage picks up: the difference between a wallet and a bank in is money in a mobile wallet the same as money in a bank, the four ways a receive side can quietly take a slice in does the person receiving pay something on an international transfer, and the country-by-country cash-out arithmetic in the mobile-money SMS-to-cash piece.