Why your transfer fee changes by delivery method

Send the same $500 to the same person and the fee can range from under a dollar to several dollars, depending purely on how it's delivered. This isn't arbitrary pricing — each delivery method has a genuinely different cost structure behind it, and understanding it helps you pick the cheapest option that still meets your needs.

What actually drives the cost

• Bank transfer: settlement through correspondent banking relationships, which carry per-transaction clearing costs and can take 1-2 business days
• Mobile money: near-instant settlement through telecom-run rails, generally cheaper than bank transfer but fees vary significantly by network
• Cash pickup: requires a physical agent network to be paid and reconciled, which is the most operationally expensive method to run
• Wallet-to-wallet: the cheapest by a wide margin, since funds never leave the same closed-loop system
• Crypto payout: network transaction fees plus on/off-ramp conversion costs, which fluctuate with blockchain congestion

Why we show all methods side by side

Rather than defaulting you to whichever method is most profitable for us, we show every available delivery method for a corridor with its live fee and speed before you choose. If your recipient has a wallet and doesn't need cash in hand, wallet transfer will almost always be your cheapest option — but that's your call to make with full information, not ours to make for you.

The one thing that doesn't change across delivery methods is the exchange rate itself — you always get the same live mid-market rate regardless of how the money arrives. Only the delivery fee varies.