Checked Friday morning, 28 August: 300 pounds from the UK to a Sri Lanka bank account, sent through the apps with a fresh price this morning. The top three apps arrived within about a pound of each other. The worst named app came in 5,234 rupees behind the best, or about £11.75.
The number to beat this week is Instarem’s. It delivers 132,574 rupees for 300 pounds sent, narrowly ahead of Remitly 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Instarem | LKR 132,573.51 | £0 | Best regular price this week. No visible fee, and the exchange rate is about 0.76 percent below the real market rate. That gap is worth about £2.28 on 300 pounds. About 233 rupees ahead of Remitly, worth about £0.52. |
| Remitly | LKR 132,340.59 | £1.49 | Essentially tied with Wise. The exchange rate is about 0.44 percent below the real market rate, worth about £1.31 on the money that gets converted. About 244 rupees ahead of Wise, or £0.55. |
| Wise | LKR 132,096.47 | £3.35 | The safe default. Rate right at the real market rate, visible fee, and the money lands within the same working day. About 477 rupees behind Instarem, or £1.07. |
| Western Union | LKR 130,038.74 | £0.99 | About 2,535 rupees behind Instarem, or £5.69. The £0.99 fee looks tiny; the exchange rate quietly takes another 2.33 percent, worth about £6.98 on the money that gets converted. |
| Xoom (PayPal) | LKR 129,333.76 | £2.99 | About 3,240 rupees behind Instarem, or £7.28. The exchange rate takes about 2.21 percent, worth about £6.56 on the money that gets converted. |
| OFX | LKR 127,339.48 | £7.00 | Worst named this week. About 5,234 rupees behind Instarem, or £11.75. The £7 fee is on the screen; the exchange rate takes another 2.40 percent, worth about £7.03 on the money that gets converted. |
Rates checked Friday 28 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 04:29, Remitly at 04:40, Western Union at 04:21, Xoom at 04:55, and OFX at 04:20.
To sanity-check the exchange rate, we cross-referenced Wise’s own dollar cross-rate: the pound at 1.35895 US dollars and the dollar at 327.675 rupees give a pound-to-rupee rate of 445.29, exactly on Wise’s direct live rate of 445.294. The rate is verified. Two daily-lagging independent sources (open.er-api.com and exchangerate-api.com) both put the rate at 446.44 rupees to the pound, a fraction higher, because they update once a day at midnight UK time and the pound has moved a touch lower since.
MoneyGram, LemFi, Taptap Send, Sendwave, WorldRemit, Skrill, PayPal, Nationwide and the UK high-street banks do not show a fresh price on this route in the comparison today.
What to actually open
If you already have Instarem installed, use Instarem. On 300 pounds this week it delivered 233 rupees more than Remitly, worth about £0.52, and 477 rupees more than Wise, worth about £1.07. It is the best regular price on the table, narrowly, and there is no fee to add on top.
If you already have Remitly installed, Remitly is a fine answer too. It delivered 244 rupees more than Wise for the same 300 pounds, worth about £0.55. That is a tie by any real measure. Use whichever of Remitly or Wise you already have.
If you do not already have Instarem or Remitly and do not want to set up a new app, use Wise. On 300 pounds this week Wise gave 477 rupees less than Instarem, 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 £1.07, opening a new app is not worth the friction for most senders.
If you are a new Remitly customer, the first-transfer offer is worth taking. Remitly’s UK page advertises a promotional rate of 455.12 rupees to 1 pound on your first transfer, with the fee waived, 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 136,536 rupees, with no fee. That is roughly 3,962 rupees more than Instarem’s everyday number this morning, or about £8.90.
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 £9.55. That is £7.28 more than Instarem took on the same 300 pounds, on the same morning.
Do not open OFX at all for a 300 pound send. On this morning’s numbers OFX kept about £14.03 of your 300 pounds between the £7 fee and the wide exchange rate. Instarem kept £2.28. 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 Sri Lanka bank account is a same-working-day route on the named apps in the table for most sends. Wise typically clears in a few hours to the same day; the other apps do not publish a delivery estimate through the Wise feed, but a bank deposit to Sri Lanka usually lands within the same working day for a payment funded by bank transfer this early in the morning.
That matters if the money is needed today for a hospital bill in Colombo or a school fee up-country. A £1.07 difference at the top of the table is not worth losing a fast, familiar route for.
Next Friday: another country, another number.