Sending money from the UK to Moldova has a first question, and most guides skip past it. It is not which app to use. It is which currency the family on the other side keeps in their account.
Moldovan banks let residents hold ordinary accounts in leu, in euro, and often in dollars, all under the same client. Maib, the biggest domestic bank, sets this out in plain terms on its own site: an individual can open several accounts in national currency and in foreign currency. A lot of families use that option. Older ones especially.
That single fact changes the answer for a sender in London. If the money is landing in leu, the picture looks like every other app-based transfer: pick the cheapest of Wise, Revolut, Paysend, TransferGo, and you are done. If the money is landing in euro at a Moldovan bank, the answer flips, and most of the apps that look cheap on paper start losing you money in a second conversion. If the money is cash at a bank counter, you are in Western Union and MoneyGram territory, and the cheap apps are not even on the list.
Name the landing first. Then pick the tool.
Why so many families quietly prefer euro at their bank
It is not paranoia and it is not preference for its own sake. It is a memory.
In November 2014, three Moldovan banks (Banca de Economii, Banca Sociala, Unibank) had roughly a billion dollars stolen from them through a network of fake loans. That was around an eighth of the whole country’s yearly output, gone in one go. The scandal has a name in Moldova: Frauda Miliardului, the billion-dollar fraud. The mastermind was sentenced to fifteen years in prison in absentia and fled abroad. The former prime minister of the time served nine years in a related conviction. The banks were wound up, and the whole country paid for it in inflation and a slower economy for years after.
A person who was thirty at the time is forty-two today. Anyone who lived through Frauda Miliardului as an adult saver learned a quiet lesson: keep some of the money you cannot afford to lose in something other than leu at a Moldovan bank. When the option to keep her salary in euro at the same bank came in, plenty of people took it. When their relatives abroad started sending money home, they asked for it in euro too.
If you are sending to a parent, an aunt, an older sibling in Chisinau, Balti, or Cahul, ask them which account they want the money in. The answer is often not the one you expect, and it changes which app is worth using.
The three landings, and which tool fits each
Leu (MDL) at a Moldovan bank account. This is the mainstream case, especially for younger recipients. Any of the app-based options work here. The catch worth knowing about is Wise. As of July 2026, Wise from the UK does not send leu at all; its own Moldova page says as much, that the leu route from the UK is not built yet. What Wise offers instead is a dollar transfer over the international bank system to a Moldovan bank, with a fee on top and intermediary bank charges the sender does not usually see with a normal Wise transfer. It is not the cheap Wise experience the reader is expecting. For a leu landing today, Revolut, Paysend, TransferGo, and Remitly are the app-side options that actually deliver leu.
Euro (EUR) at a Moldovan bank account. This is where most guides go wrong. If you send with an app that converts to leu on the way, and the family then converts back to euro at their bank, you pay for both conversions. It is a real cost, not a rounding error. The better answer is a direct euro transfer to the family’s euro account at their Moldovan bank. Since October 2025, Maib is connected to the single euro payments system that European banks use, which means a euro payment from a UK bank to a Maib euro account now moves at close to eurozone speed and cost. Ask the family for their euro IBAN. Send in euro from your UK bank, or from a service that supports a direct euro payment into Moldova without a leu leg in the middle.
Cash at a bank counter. This is still how a lot of older or rural families collect. It is not old-fashioned; it is what works when the recipient does not use an app, or lives an hour from the nearest branch. Western Union and MoneyGram both operate at Moldovan bank counters, in leu, in minutes, for a flat fee that is higher than the app options but is a fair price for the pickup service. Wise and Revolut do not offer cash pickup at all.
What 300 pounds looks like on each option
These numbers were pulled on 14 July 2026. Every rate has a day next to it because rates move; do not treat these as this month’s numbers if you are reading this later than this month.
- Real rate that day (the one you get if you search GBP to MDL on Google): 1 pound = 23.50 leu. On 300 pounds that is 7,050 leu before any provider takes anything.
- Wise from the UK to Moldova: not a leu send, dollar-over-the-old-bank-system only. On a 300-pound sum the intermediary charges typically eat a chunk that a Wise sender is not used to seeing. Skip Wise for this direction, at least until they add leu.
- Paysend from the UK to Moldova: flat 1 pound fee, card to card, in leu. The rate on top is close to the real rate. On 300 pounds you land at around 7,000 leu after the fee, subject to the current markup Paysend applies.
- Revolut, Standard plan: leu send. Fast on the sending side, but the leu bank-landing itself typically takes 3 to 5 business days on Revolut’s own timings for a UK to Moldova bank IBAN. If the recipient has a Revolut account of their own, or you push to their Visa or Mastercard rather than a bank IBAN, it lands in minutes. Cost is comparable to Paysend on the FX side.
- TransferGo, standard: leu send, next business day, called out as often the cheapest option on this direction in the monthly comparison figures.
- Western Union or MoneyGram, cash pickup at a Moldovan bank counter: leu, minutes, higher fee (typically several pounds on 300), but this is a service the app options do not perform.
- For a euro landing at a Maib euro account: send in euro from your UK bank as an ordinary international payment, or use a specialist that supports GBP to EUR into Moldova without a leu leg. Ask the sending bank for the euro amount that will land and the total UK-side cost before you send; do not accept “no fee” as an answer without seeing the arriving amount.
The 300 pounds baseline matches the number we use every week for the Friday number column, so if you have read one of those pieces the shape here should feel familiar. Verify these numbers for yourself on the day you send. Providers move their pricing, and the leu is not a fixed rate against the pound.
What changed after 2022
Until early 2022, a large share of the money coming into Moldova was from family members working in Russia. Roubles moved through Russian bank services and specialist cash pickup networks. Sanctions and the response to them cut through that route. By late 2024, the last of the Russian cash pickup services still operating between Russia and Moldova had been shut down by Moldovan banks. What replaced it was Italy, Germany, Romania, and the UK. Most Moldovan families who used to receive from Moscow now receive from a cousin in Milan or a sister in Manchester.
If that is your family, and you are the sister in Manchester picking up the sends your cousin in Russia used to make, that is a very recent change. The Moldova money picture on the app side is only about three years old in its current shape, and a lot of the guides online are still catching up to that.
A word on Transnistria
If your family is in Tiraspol, Bender, Ribnita, the banking picture is not the same. Transnistria runs its own small set of banks, mostly cut off from international payments; the Moldovan mainland apps and networks in this piece do not serve those addresses in the ordinary way. What people do in practice is have the money land at a mainland bank account or a mainland pickup counter, and the family member crosses to collect. That is the workaround, and it is imperfect. Ask, and do not assume the app that works for Chisinau works for Tiraspol.
Somewhere in Balti this evening, a mother will check her phone for a notification that the money from London has arrived. Whether she sees roughly 6,900 leu on the arriving line, or something noticeably smaller, depends on choices made in the UK before you tapped send. Call her first. Ask which account, which currency. Then send it there, and check the number on Google against the number your app shows you, on the day.
Corrections
- 2026-07-14: An earlier version of this page said a Revolut Standard leu send to Moldova was “same-day”. Revolut’s own UK to Moldova page states that a bank-landing transfer generally arrives within 3 to 5 business days; same-day only applies to Revolut-to-Revolut or a card push. The list entry has been rewritten to match the provider’s own timings.
- 2026-07-14: An earlier version of this page said, of the 2014 Frauda Miliardului scandal, that “the main figure went to prison”. The main figure, Ilan Șor, was sentenced to fifteen years in absentia in April 2023 and is a fugitive abroad. Former prime minister Vlad Filat served nine years in a related conviction. The paragraph has been rewritten to name both correctly.