The fee is not the point
What people are actually paying for when they send money home.
Nigeria received about $21.8bn in recorded remittances in 2025, according to its central bank. Kenya passed $5bn for the first time. Ghana’s central bank reported nearly $7.8bn, more than the country received in foreign direct investment. These are large numbers and they are the ones that appear in pitch decks and policy papers. They are also almost entirely beside the point for the person sending the money.
I cofounded a remittance company that serves customers in the UK, Canada, Europe and the USA sending to Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania, Ivory Coast and a growing list of other countries. Read the transaction data of a business like that and very little of it looks the way the industry describes it.
What a transfer is for
A remittance is rarely an abstract movement of value. It is a school fee due on a specific date. It is a hospital bill that has to be settled before the pharmacy releases the medication. It is a contribution to a funeral that is happening on Saturday. It is rent for a parent, sent on the same day every month, in the same amount, for years. It is a wedding contribution that arrives with a message. The money is the medium. The purpose is almost always a person and a deadline.
Once you see the transfers that way, the industry’s obsession with the fee looks misplaced. The average cost of sending £120 or £300 from the UK to Nigeria was 1.96% in the World Bank’s latest survey, well under the United Nations target of less than 3%, and the cheapest providers are effectively free. On a £300 transfer the difference between the cheapest option and an average one is a few pounds. Nobody sending money for a hospital bill is choosing a provider to save the price of a coffee.
What people actually pay for
They are paying for certainty. Did it arrive, in full, when I said it would? Can the person at the other end see it in their account before the pharmacy closes? If something goes wrong, will a human being pick up the phone?
Certainty has several parts. Speed is one, but it is speed at the right moment rather than speed in the abstract. A transfer that lands in four minutes at midday is no better than one that lands in two hours if the school bursar is not at her desk until Monday. Predictability is another. A rate that is slightly worse but known in advance is worth more to most senders than a rate that might be better and might not be. Communication is a third, and it is the one the industry consistently underinvests in. The sender wants to know the status of the transfer without opening the app. The recipient wants to know money is coming before it arrives.
Why this shapes how we build
When my cofounders and I were working on how to describe the company, the phrase we kept coming back to was “when it matters.” Not because it is a clever line but because it is the honest one. The transfers that define whether a customer stays are the ones sent under pressure, and a remittance company is judged entirely on how it performs in those moments.
That has practical consequences for how a remittance company should be built. Settlement rails should be chosen for reliability at weekends and evenings, not for the lowest average cost. The notification that a transfer has arrived should be treated as part of the product rather than an afterthought. Support should be staffed for the hours when Nigerian and Kenyan banks are slowest, not for UK office hours. And the first number on the dashboard should be how many transfers arrived on time and in full, not how many were sent.
The fee will keep falling across the industry, and that is a good thing. But it was never the reason anyone sent the money. The reason is on the other end of the transfer, waiting.