The real cost of sending money home is the rate, not the fee

Ask somebody how much it costs to send money home and they will tell you the fee. Three pounds. Five dollars. A flat rate on a poster.

The fee is rarely where the money goes.

Where it actually goes

Imagine two services. One charges a flat fee and converts at a rate two percent away from the market. The other charges more in fees and converts at a rate half a percent away.

On anything but a tiny amount, the one with the higher fee is cheaper — often considerably. But the posters compare fees, so the comparison people actually make is the wrong one.

This is not an accident. The fee is the number on the poster precisely because it is the number that can be made to look small.

A quote with its working shown

A BitriPay quote carries four things:

• The rate you are being given.
• The mid rate it was built from — the reference.
• The margin, in basis points, between the two.
• The fee, and the exact amount that will arrive in the recipient’s currency.

The margin is the important one. It turns "the rate" from a number you cannot evaluate into a cost you can compare against anybody else — if they will tell you theirs.

The quote expires, and that is a feature

Every quote carries an expiry.

Pay within it and that rate applies, whatever the market did in the meantime. Pay after it has expired and you are re-quoted or refunded — never silently converted at whatever the rate has become.

That last clause is the one that matters. Silent re-conversion is how a sender ends up explaining to their mother why less arrived than they promised, with no way to find out why.

Who holds it on the way

Every corridor records its licence basis and the partners on both legs — who collects, who pays out, under whose authorisation.

A corridor carries real customer funds only once an administrator has marked it live against those records. That step is deliberately slow and deliberately documented, because a corridor running without a clear answer to whose licence is this under is a corridor nobody should be sending their family’s money through.

What to ask any service

Three questions, and you will know most of what matters:

1. What is your mid rate, and what is your margin on it?
2. How long is the quote locked, and what happens if I pay late?
3. Who is authorised at each end of this corridor?

A service that cannot answer the first one is answering it anyway.

What you can check

These are facts about the running platform, not adjectives. Each one is visible in the product, in the API reference or in the ledger.

• A quote carries its rate, the mid rate behind it and the margin in basis points, so the cost of conversion is a number rather than an impression.
• Quotes have an expiry, and a payment against an expired quote is re-quoted or refunded instead of being converted at whatever the rate has become.
• The arriving amount is shown in the recipient’s currency before the sender commits.
• Each corridor records its licence basis and its partners, and only a corridor an administrator has marked live may carry real customer funds.
• Conversions that are posted carry their margin into the ledger, so the true cost of a corridor is measurable rather than estimated.

What it costs

Two numbers, both quoted up front: the fee, and the margin on the exchange rate in basis points. The arriving amount is shown before you pay.

Is it switched on?

Whether this is available depends on the authorisations in place and on what the administrator of a given deployment has switched on. That changes, and an article does not — so the live answer lives on the feature page, which reads it from the platform itself: Remittance on the features page.

Read next

• Currency exchange — A rate you can audit, not just accept.
• Corridor network — Regulatory posture as configuration.
• Agents and cash — The last mile is a person.