About Boki
Boki is for the resourceful person moving money across borders.
Plain, expert help: what to do, what to avoid, what a transfer really costs.
aboki
Hausa · friend
Boki is short for "aboki". It is a word in the Nigerian Hausa language that means friend. It is also the everyday name for the men who change money on the street, informally, at rates the banks do not give, for people the banks do not always serve.
Aboki, in that sense, is not a joke or a warning. It is a real service that reaches ordinary people, and often the only one that does.
Who Boki is for
Someone tired, at the end of a long day, working out whether the £200 she is about to send will arrive as 185 or 190.
Someone who has been overcharged by her bank once too often. Someone who knows the money should have gone further than it did.
What Boki does
We write plain guides that say, for a given route, which provider to use, which to avoid, and why. Real numbers, the one catch to watch, and nothing more than she needs to decide.
Each week we also publish the Friday number: what a fixed amount sent to one country really arrived as this week, across the major providers, with names attached.
What Boki is not
Boki is not a comparison widget. A widget can only say "this rate is a little lower than that one". It cannot tell you not to use that provider on this route because you will lose £12 on £200 and never see the loss on the screen. We can, and we do.
How we check the numbers
- What arrives, not the fee We compare how much arrives at the other end on a fixed amount, so a cost hidden in the rate still shows.
- Against the real rate The one Google shows. An independent rate feed is checked against it.
- Timestamped Each price has the time it was taken. We hold the raw data on file.
- Corrected in public When we get something wrong, the fix is dated and explained at the foot of the page.
Why this is called Boki
An aboki is, in the end, a stranger you trust with your money because he gives you a rate you cannot get anywhere else. His living depends on that rate being fair. That is the whole idea behind this site.