Methodology & data transparency

How we rank

By default we rank every provider on one thing: the payout — the amount of destination currency your recipient actually receives. Crucially, the amount you enter is treated as your total cost, fees included. If you enter $1,000, every provider on the page is answering the same question: if I part with exactly $1,000, how much does my recipient get? A provider charging a $6 fee therefore converts $994, not $1,000. That keeps the comparison fair — a provider can no longer look best simply by quoting a strong rate and charging you extra on top of the amount compared.

amount converted = (total cost − fixed fee) ÷ (1 + percentage fee) recipient gets  = amount converted × exchange rate

If two providers pay out the same amount, the one that costs you less in total is listed first, and providers still tied after that are listed alphabetically.

You can switch the ranking to user rating, which orders providers by their aggregated Google Play Store and Apple App Store review score. Providers with the same rating are listed in alphabetical order.

How user ratings are collected

A rating only means something in the store you would actually download from, so we take each provider’s score from the app stores of the country you are sending from. A US dollar transfer shows the US Google Play and Apple App Store scores; a pound transfer shows the UK stores; a Canadian dollar transfer shows the Canadian stores, and so on. The euro has no single store of its own, so euro corridors are ranked on the Irish App Store and Google Play, which we use to represent the euro area as a whole; the rating tooltip says so on every euro result. The same provider can score very differently market to market, and those differences are exactly what we want you to see.

The two platform scores are combined into one figure, weighted by how many ratings each has, so a listing with a handful of reviews cannot outweigh one with hundreds of thousands. Listings with fewer than 20 ratings in a market are set aside when a better-supported score is available. Scores are refreshed automatically once a day, and the info icon beside any rating shows the exact platform scores, review counts and collection date behind it.

Two honest limitations. Google publishes a provider’s ratings count worldwide rather than per country, so its per-market score is weighted on that worldwide count. And where a provider has no listing at all in your sending market, we fall back to the average across every store we track and say so in the tooltip.

Every result also shows its effective rate: the recipient amount divided by the total you pay (transfer amount plus all fees). It captures fees and FX spread in a single comparable number, so you can see when a flashy headline rate hides its cost elsewhere.

effective rate = recipient amount ÷ (amount sent + fees)

Where our data comes from

Most of our pricing is live, but some of it is not — and every row on the site tells you which it is. The pricing that is not live is confined to corridors no readable source yet covers: chiefly the riyal (Gulf) corridors and most Africa-to-diaspora directions. On those, where we show a figure at all it is labelled Indicative. Everywhere a corridor has live pricing, only live quotes are ranked.

Live rates. Every live quote on BestAfricanFX is collected directly from the provider’s own rate endpoint, public converter or pricing API — there is no intermediary feed between us and the provider. Each source is refreshed automatically every six hours. Those rows show a Last updated time — the moment our system last collected the quote.

Mid-market rates are never shown as a provider’s price. Some providers publish a mid-market rate — the rate banks trade at between themselves — on their currency-chart pages. Nobody sends money at that rate. Where a provider publishes both, we take the rate it quotes on its own send-money page, which is what you would actually receive, and ignore the chart figure entirely.

A rate with no published fee is shown, but never above a fully-priced provider. Ria and WorldRemit publish live exchange rates on their own converters but disclose no transfer fee — not on their pages, and not in the services behind them. Rather than drop them or assume their fee is zero, we show their rates with an explicit fee not published note, mark the payout as a before-fee figure, and rank them below every provider whose full cost we can confirm. A hidden fee can never lift a provider above a quote we can stand behind.

Live quotes are requested on a 1,000-unit transfer. We store the exchange rate and the fixed fee and recompute the payout for the amount you enter, so a provider with tiered fees can differ slightly at other amounts.

Indicative figures. Several providers that matter a great deal on African corridors still publish nothing we can read. No source we can read covers the riyal corridors, or most Africa-to-diaspora directions, yet. In some corridors, a fee may be labelled Indicative: a reference point, not a quote. We are working through direct data partnerships to replace every indicative figure with a live one. Where a corridor does have live pricing, indicative rows are withheld entirely so they can never compete against a real quote in the ranking. Instead, any provider we track but cannot price on that corridor is listed beneath the comparison with no rate at all and a link to check on their own site — visible, but holding no position in the ranking it has not earned.

We would rather show you a short list of rates we can stand behind than a long list we cannot. Rates change constantly — always confirm the final rate and fees on the provider’s own site before sending.

What the shield beside a provider means

Some providers carry a small shield next to their name and others do not. The shield describes how that provider’s pricing reaches us — nothing more. A shield means we collect that provider’s rates through a direct, structured data feed: their own rate endpoint or pricing API that returns machine-readable numbers we ingest automatically. Providers without a shield are collected by observation — we read the live rate from their public currency converter or send-money page. Both are genuine, live rates, collected on the same schedule; the shield simply tells you which channel a given rate came through.

The shield is not a trust, safety or verification score. It does not mean we have vetted, endorsed, licensed or approved that provider, that it is more reputable or more regulated than an unshielded one, or that its rate is more accurate. We do not operate a verification, accreditation or due-diligence system for providers, and the shield must not be read as one. It also carries no weight in the ranking — providers are ordered purely by payout (or by user rating if you choose that view), and a shielded provider gets no advantage over an unshielded one.

Whether a provider has a shield depends only on whether they expose a feed we can read directly. As more providers give us structured access, more will gain the shield — but an unshielded provider is not a worse or riskier choice, and you should always confirm the final rate and fees on the provider’s own site before sending.

Official central-bank rates, and why the date may not be today

Alongside the market comparison we show the official rate published by the relevant central bank — the Central Bank of Nigeria, Bank of Ghana, Central Bank of Kenya, Central Bank of Egypt and the South African Reserve Bank — pulled straight from each bank’s own published source, never from a third party. It is reference data only: it is shown beside the comparison and tracked over time, and is never mixed into or ranked against provider quotes.

These rates are published on business days only. Central banks do not issue a new official rate on weekends or public holidays, and they do not all publish at the same time of day. So the date shown against an official rate is the day that rate applies to — on a Saturday, Sunday or holiday it will read the last business day, and early in the day it may read yesterday until that bank publishes. This is expected: a date that is not today means no newer rate has been issued, not that our data is stale. An info marker beside every official-rate figure explains this on hover.

When we compute anything from the official rate — the market-versus-official spread, distortion rankings, or day-to-day movement — we always use each bank’s most recently published rate, carried forward until a newer one is issued. Where a central bank does not publish a particular pair directly (for example a non-USD pair), we derive it as a cross-rate from that bank’s own published USD rate and label it as derived.

Why banks appear in the results, and how to read their rating

On some corridors a high-street bank appears alongside the specialist services, clearly labelled Bank. We include them because the gap between a bank transfer and a specialist is often the single biggest number on the page, and seeing it is exactly the point.

Banks do carry a user rating on BestAfricanFX, collected the same way as every other provider. One honest caveat comes with it: a bank’s app-store score reflects its whole banking app, not its international-transfer service specifically, whereas a specialist’s score is effectively a score of its transfer service alone. We still show the bank’s rating rather than hide it, because many people quite reasonably want to know how well-regarded a bank’s app and overall service are before trusting it with a transfer — just read a bank’s rating as a signal about the bank as a whole, and a specialist’s rating as a signal about the transfer itself.

Banks are ranked by payout exactly like everyone else, and take part in the user-rating view on that overall app score. They are not priced on every corridor, so you will not see one on every page.

Independence

Our rankings, analysis and projections are completely independent and are never affected or influenced by provider sponsorships, partnerships, advertisements, promotions or any other commercial relationship. Results are ordered purely by the payout your recipient receives, or by user rating if you choose that ranking. We may earn a commission from provider click-throughs and from transfers that originate from BestAfricanFX — but that revenue plays no part in how any provider is ranked, rated or analysed. Sponsored placements, where shown, are always clearly labelled and are never given ranking preference.

Important disclaimer

Rates are subject to change. Confirm the final rate and fees with the provider before completing your transaction. BestAfricanFX does not hold, transfer, convert or intermediate funds and is not a money services business.