Checked Friday morning, 21 August: 300 pounds from the UK to a Vietnam bank account, sent through the apps with a fresh price this morning. The top three apps arrived within about half a pound of each other. The worst named app came in 648,883 dong behind the best, or about £18.24.
The number to beat this week is Remitly’s. It delivers 10,586,862 dong for 300 pounds sent, narrowly ahead of Instarem and Wise. The three are so close that the choice for most senders comes down to which app they already have installed, not which one is best on paper.
Here is what each one delivered.
| App | £300 arrives as | Visible fee | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Remitly | VND 10,586,862 | £0.99 | Best regular price this week. Rate about 0.49 percent below the real market rate. About 19,454 dong ahead of Wise, worth about £0.55. |
| Instarem | VND 10,569,282 | £0 | Essentially tied with Wise. No visible fee, and the exchange rate is about 0.98 percent below the real market rate. That gap is worth about £2.94 on 300 pounds. |
| Wise | VND 10,567,408 | £2.99 | The safe default. Rate right at the real market rate, visible fee, and the money lands fast on this route. About 19,454 dong behind Remitly, or £0.55. |
| Xoom (PayPal) | VND 10,279,336 | £2.99 | About 307,526 dong behind Remitly, or £8.64. The exchange rate takes about 2.73 percent quietly, worth about £8.10 on the money that gets converted. |
| OFX | VND 9,937,979 | £7.00 | Worst named this week. About 648,883 dong behind Remitly, or £18.24. The £7 fee is on the screen; the exchange rate takes another 4.67 percent, worth about £13.68 on the money that gets converted. |
Rates checked Friday 21 August 2026, morning UK time. Wise’s number is from Wise’s live rate feed at 05:05 UK time, alongside its own price comparison. Wise’s own row in the comparison was sampled at 05:05 UK time. Instarem was sampled at 04:24, Remitly at 04:40, OFX at 04:21, and Xoom at 03:53.
To sanity-check the exchange rate, we cross-referenced Wise’s own dollar cross-rate: the pound at 1.3645 US dollars and the dollar at 26,075 dong give a pound-to-dong rate of 35,579, exactly on Wise’s direct live rate. The rate is verified. Two daily-lagging independent sources (open.er-api.com and exchangerate-api.com) both put the rate at 35,309 dong to the pound, a fraction lower, because they update once a day at midnight UK time and the pound has moved a touch since.
Western Union’s last sample in the comparison is from Thursday 14 August, seven days old, so it is not in the table this week. Its quoted rate then was 35,203 dong to the pound. Moneygram, LemFi, Taptap Send, Sendwave, WorldRemit, Skrill and PayPal do not show a fresh price on this route in the comparison today.
What to actually open
If you already have Remitly installed, use Remitly. On 300 pounds this week it delivered 19,454 dong more than Wise, worth about £0.55. It is the best regular price on the table, narrowly.
If you do not already have Remitly and do not want to set up a new app, use Wise. On 300 pounds this week Wise gave 19,454 dong less than Remitly, but the fee is on the screen, the exchange rate is the real market rate, and the money arrives fast on this route. For a small win of £0.55, opening a new app is not worth the friction for most senders.
If you already have Instarem installed, Instarem is a fine answer too. It delivered 1,874 dong more than Wise for the same 300 pounds, worth about £0.05. That is a tie by any real measure. Use whichever of Wise or Instarem you already have.
If you are a new Remitly customer, the first-transfer offer is worth taking. Remitly’s UK page advertises a promotional rate of 35,700.96 dong to 1 pound on your first transfer, capped at the first 500 pounds sent. A 300 pound send falls inside the cap, so the whole 300 pounds converts at the promo rate. That delivers about 10,710,288 dong, with no fee. That is roughly 123,000 dong more than Remitly’s everyday number this morning, or about £3.47.
Do not open Xoom for this send unless there is no other option. The visible £2.99 fee looks small. Once you add the fee and the gap to the real market rate, the full cost on 300 pounds this morning comes to about £11.09. That is £8.65 more than Remitly took on the same 300 pounds, on the same morning.
And do not open OFX at all for a 300 pound send. On this morning’s numbers OFX kept about £20.68 of your 300 pounds between the £7 fee and the wide exchange rate. Remitly kept £2.44. OFX is designed for much larger sends where the rate matters more than the fee; on 300 pounds it is the wrong tool.
One thing the table cannot show
The table is for a bank-deposit send. It does not tell you how quickly the money lands.
Sending to a Vietnam bank account is one of Wise’s fast rails. The money lands the same morning on most sends, not the two-day wait you see on some other Asian routes. The other apps in the table do not publish a delivery estimate through the Wise feed, but a bank deposit to Vietnam typically clears within a few hours to the same working day.
That speed matters if the money is needed today for rent, hospital fees, or a school bill in Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi. A £0.55 difference at the top of the table is not worth losing a fast, familiar route for.
Next Friday: another country, another number.
Corrections
- 2026-08-21: An earlier version of this article said Wise delivered VND 10,567,022. The correct figure from the Wise cross-feed is VND 10,567,408 – a transcription error of 386 dong. Five dependent numbers were also wrong: the Remitly-vs-Wise gap was stated as 19,840 dong (£0.56) and is 19,454 dong (£0.55); the Instarem-vs-Wise gap was stated as 2,260 dong (£0.06) and is 1,874 dong (£0.05). The “about an hour and ten minutes” delivery estimate for Wise was removed because the underlying source (the Wise cross-feed) returns a placeholder value, not a live ETA; the delivery-time section now uses the corridor-general claim, which is supported. The Wise sample time was corrected from 05:04 to 05:05 UK time.