Boki

Story

From Saturday 17 October 2026

Manila wants OFW fees down to 2 percent. The right UK app already arrives at under 1.

On £300 sent from the UK to Manila this morning, Wise charged a fee of £2.11 and 25,026.54 pesos arrived. The real exchange rate, the one Google gives you if you search it, puts £300 at 25,203.81 pesos. So the whole cost on £300 at Wise this morning is £2.11, which is 0.70 percent of the send.

Earlier this week, in Bangkok, the Philippines' finance secretary sat down with Swift and Revolut and asked them to bring the cost of sending money home down to 2 percent. Frederick Go said Filipinos abroad had been complaining of charges of 8 to 10 percent. The World Bank's own global average, he said, is 6.3 percent.

The sender who already uses Wise is below the finance secretary's target this week. She does not need a bill to pass to get there.

The number on a £300 send to Manila this week

Wise is not the only one.

  • Wise: £2.11 fee, 25,026 pesos arrive. 0.70 percent of £300.
  • WorldRemit: No fee, 25,025 pesos arrive. 0.71 percent.
  • Instarem: No fee, 25,021 pesos arrive. 0.72 percent.
  • Remitly: No fee, 24,933 pesos arrive. 1.07 percent on the Economy tier.

All four are already below the 2 percent line. Wise, WorldRemit and Instarem are below 1. The Philippines country guide has the full "which app for which family" treatment. For today's cost on £300, the choice between these four is small money.

Tip

On this send size and this route, the GCash wallet and a Philippine bank account cost the same on Wise. The decision is which one your family would rather receive into, not which is cheaper.

What your UK bank is quietly keeping

What you want to notice is who is not in that list. The UK banks are not. On the same £300 at the same hour: HSBC arrived at 24,727 pesos, which is 1.89 percent of the send. Barclays arrived at 24,470, which is 2.91 percent. Nationwide, after a £15 fee, arrived at 23,533, which is 6.63 percent, close to the World Bank global average the finance secretary cited. Santander, after a £25 fee, arrived at 22,297, which is 11.5 percent.

Santander's £25 fee is only half of what it kept. The £25 is deducted from the £300 first; the remaining £275 is then converted at a rate about three percent worse than the one the banks use between themselves. That is another £9 of your money quietly kept in the exchange rate. Together, close to £35 out of £300 is gone before anything arrives in Manila. The fee the counter shows is less than half of what the bank actually took.

Catch

If you bank with Santander, Nationwide or Barclays and send £300 home every month, that is £100 to £400 a year quietly kept in the exchange rate, every year, forever. The counter will never put that number on a receipt.

The parallel bill, in one line

The 2 percent target is not a law. The finance secretary has taken it directly to Swift and Revolut. A separate Senate bill, Villanueva's SB 1917, passed on third reading in March; it is about rate disclosure and a 50 percent fee discount for qualified OFWs, not a 2 percent cap. Both will take time.

If you need to send £300 to Manila this weekend, open Wise. The fee is £2.11, 25,026 pesos arrive, and the transfer is done in seconds. If Wise is not already on your phone, WorldRemit or Instarem arrive at nearly the same number for no fee.

Corrections

None so far. If we get something wrong, the fix is dated here.