The review
Remitly is the odd one out here on purpose. It is not somewhere you keep money. It is a way of getting money from where you are to somebody else, and its particular strength is that the somebody else does not need a bank account.
That matters more than a page about remote work usually admits. A great many people working abroad are sending money to parents, children or siblings at home, and for a large share of the world the person at the other end collects cash over a counter or receives it into a mobile wallet. Wise, Revolut, N26 and Payoneer all assume a bank account at both ends. Remitly reaches around 175 countries with roughly 490,000 cash collection points behind it.
We are not quoting a price, and that is deliberate. Remitly sets its fees and its exchange rate separately for every country pair, and it runs heavily discounted rates on first transfers, so any single number we printed would be wrong for most readers and misleading for the rest. Get a quote for your own route, and get a second one for the same route a month later once the introductory rate has gone, before you decide it is the cheapest.
What works
- The recipient needs no bank account at all
- Cash collection at around 490,000 locations
- Pays into mobile money wallets where those are normal
- Reaches roughly 175 countries, far wider than the accounts here
What does not
- Not an account: no balance, no card, nothing held
- No deposit protection or safeguarding to speak of for you
- No published rates; every country pair is priced separately
- First-transfer offers make the real ongoing cost hard to judge