Send £300 with a normal remittance app and £300 lands. Send it another way and the family sometimes counts a smaller number when they check the account, and no one on the sending side ever explains why. This piece walks through the four ways the receive side can take a slice, and the one lever that closes almost all of it.
The lever first, since it is the whole answer for most people. If you send with Wise, LemFi, Sendwave, Remitly or WorldRemit, the number on your screen is the number that lands in your family’s account or wallet. These apps do not use the international bank system for the last step of the transfer. They hand your pounds to a partner inside the destination country, and the partner pays out in the local currency on the local system. There is no bank in the middle taking a fee, and no bank on the other end doing its own exchange.
Wise puts this in writing on its own help page: for the small number of routes where a fee could still be deducted along the way, “Wise predicts these upfront and adds them to your fee, so your recipient still gets the full amount, and there are no surprises on arrival.” The other four apps operate the same way for the family bank accounts and mobile wallets they support in the routes Boki writes about.
The one exception is Revolut. Its Foreign Currency International Transfer still goes through the old international bank system, and Revolut says plainly that its fees “do not cover any intermediary or recipient bank fees that could be incurred.” If you use Revolut for a family send and pick its cheaper fee option, the receiving side can still take a small slice. Pick the “OUR” option, where you pay every fee upfront, or use one of the five apps above.
If none of that describes what you sent, and your family still got less than the number on your screen, one of the four things below explains it.
The four things that can take a slice
1. The fees the banks along the way take
If you send with your own high-street bank, the money leaves London on a route called SWIFT. On that route, your pounds are handed from your UK bank to one or two other banks on the way to your family’s bank, and each of those banks takes a fee, usually somewhere between $15 and $50 per bank. That fee is deducted from the money in flight. Your screen does not show it, and your family sees the missing amount but not the reason for it.
On a £500 wire from a UK high-street bank to a Nigerian or Kenyan bank account, this fee alone can eat the sterling equivalent of £20 to £40 before your family’s bank has even touched the money. It does not happen when you send with the apps above, because they do not use the international bank system for these routes.
2. The exchange the receiving bank does when it lands
If the money arrives at your family’s bank in a currency that is not the account’s home currency, the receiving bank has to change it before it goes into the account. It does that at its own exchange rate. That rate is worse than the real exchange rate you looked at when you sent the money, and the difference is what the receiving bank keeps.
This is the biggest slice on the classic bank-to-bank wire route into Nigeria, where a US dollar wire lands in a naira account. The receiving bank converts the dollars at the market window rate, not at the Google rate you saw. On $1,000 that can be the sterling equivalent of £20 to £50 gone, depending on the week. None of this happens if you send with a modern app that delivers naira, cedis or pesos directly.
3. The wallet’s own fee to receive money from abroad
Some mobile wallets around the world charge a small load fee on money arriving from abroad. On the routes Boki writes about, this is almost never true. M-Pesa in Kenya, MTN MoMo and AirtelTigo Money in Ghana, GCash in the Philippines and the naira wallets in Nigeria (OPay, PalmPay, Kuda) all take incoming international transfers for free on the recipient’s side.
What is not free is the moment your family takes physical cash out at the agent. That fee is small on a normal-sized send, and it is not deducted from the amount that arrives in the wallet: it is deducted from the notes she can walk away with. On a Kenya M-Pesa send of 20,000 to 35,000 shillings the agent fee is about 197 shillings, roughly £1.15. On a Ghana MoMo send of 4,560 cedis the flat agent charge is 20 cedis, roughly £1.30. Both are the family’s side of the arithmetic, not yours, and both go away completely if the money stays on the wallet and she spends it there.
4. The country’s own tax on incoming money
This is the one that people worry about most, and on the routes Boki writes about it is mostly a myth or mostly gone.
The tax people ask about most for India is TCS, Tax Collected at Source. It applies only to money leaving India, not to money coming in. If you are sending from the UK to a family member in India, into an NRE, NRO or resident savings account, no TCS is deducted. Your family’s account type matters for other reasons, but not for this one.
Ghana used to charge a 1 percent tax on mobile-money transfers inside the country, called the e-levy. Even at its peak it did not apply to money coming in from abroad. President Mahama assented to the repeal in April 2025, so the state now charges nothing on the mobile-money transfer itself. Anyone still telling you Ghana’s e-levy will nibble at your MoMo transfer is reading old advice.
Nigeria changed the rules on 1 May 2026. The Central Bank of Nigeria now requires every licensed money-transfer operator to pay diaspora recipients in naira, at a rate benchmarked to the live market. The full detail is in our piece on the new settlement rule. In practice, the naira rate on LemFi and Wise is within about half a percent of the real market rate, so the number on your screen is close to the number the family sees.
What has closed is the old bank-to-bank USD wire route, where the receiving bank was doing its own conversion. Today that route pays out at the market rate too. Cross-check against the most recent Nigeria Friday number for the week’s actual delivered amount.
Kenya has a 20 percent government tax on M-Pesa transaction fees, called excise duty. It does not touch incoming money. It sits on the fee the family pays when she sends, withdraws or pays a bill on M-Pesa. If she is only receiving, she pays nothing. And in the Philippines and Pakistan, neither country charges the recipient a tax on incoming remittances from abroad.
What the answer looks like on your route
If your route is a normal remittance app into a family account or wallet in Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, India, the Philippines or Pakistan, the number on your screen is the number that lands. If she takes physical cash out of a wallet, a small agent fee comes off the notes she walks away with, not off the wallet balance.
If your route is your UK bank app sending a wire through the international bank system into a family bank account in any of those six countries, expect the family to see £15 to £50 missing on a £500 send, between the fees the banks along the way take and the receiving bank’s own exchange when the currency does not match. Do not use this route for family remittance. Use one of the apps above.
If your route is Revolut, the “OUR” fee option means the family gets the full amount, and the cheaper one means the receiving side can still take a small slice. Or use Wise for the same job with no fine print.
What to check on your next send
Open your app, type in the pound amount you plan to send, and look at the arrival number. Now open one of the apps above (Wise if you are new to this) and type in the same amount. Compare the two arrival numbers.
If they match to within a pound or two, you are on the right route and the four things above do not touch you. If the app is showing a lower arrival number, or no arrival number at all, the difference is the slice, and one of the four things above is going to eat it. Switch app before you send.
She sees the amount that lands. That is the number that matters, and now you know where it comes from. The rest of Boki’s arrival coverage picks up from there: what a wallet can and cannot do, what cashing out costs, and what to check when the number she sees does not match the number you sent.
Corrections
- 2026-07-31: An earlier version of this page linked the provider names Wise, LemFi, Remitly and WorldRemit to
/reviews/pages that do not yet exist on the site (returned 404). The links have been removed and the provider names left as plain text. Sendwave and Revolut retain their links because those review pages resolve.