How Corridor works

The share of your money that fees and exchange-rate markup take, measured against the true mid-market rate: the rate banks trade at with each other, the one you see on Google or xe.com. It isn’t what a provider says it charges. It’s the whole gap between what you send and what lands.

Total cost % = 1 − (amount received ÷ amount you’d receive at the mid-market rate, with no fees)

It’s the same method the World Bank’s Remittance Prices Worldwide database uses, so it’s a standard, not something invented to flatter any provider.

The mid-market rate comes from Frankfurter, a free service that publishes official central-bank rates. It is fetched live and cached for up to an hour. The rate chart on each corridor page uses the same source.

Wise, Western Union and PayPal are the three providers Corridor ranks, because they’re the three that a real, public feed backs. Their quotes come from Wise’s public comparison feed. A daily run at 06:17 UTC refreshes Wise and Western Union on every corridor, and PayPal only where the feed returns a PayPal quote; the feed is also queried live for the exact amount you enter. Corridors where the feed has no PayPal quote use PayPal’s own rate, entered by hand from Xoom (its money transfer service), and those rows show the date they were checked, because that date is the only sign of how old the number is.

Other providers aren’t shown. We’d rather list three you can trust than ten we’re guessing at; each comes back once we have a source we trust for it.

The Live badge means the benchmark is live: the mid-market rate each quote is measured against was fetched just now. It does not mean every provider quote was fetched this second. Each row says which kind it is: a Live quote was fetched for your exact amount just now; a row with no tag was refreshed in the daily run; a row with a date was entered by hand on that date.

Where a quote states its fee and exchange rate, we show them, but only when they reproduce the amount beside them (send amount minus fee, times rate, matches what arrives). If they don’t, or the quote doesn’t state them, the row says “See provider” rather than showing a number that contradicts the headline. Delivery time is shown only where a provider states one in the feed we use; right now that’s Wise. We don’t estimate delivery times.

You can enter any amount from 10 to 50,000 in the sending currency. Wise, Western Union and PayPal are quoted live for exactly your amount wherever the feed carries them. Not every provider quotes every amount: PayPal drops out of the feed above roughly 10,000, and Western Union on some corridors above roughly 25,000. A provider with no quote at your amount is left out and named on the page, never filled in with a guess.

Where a provider isn’t in the feed for a corridor (a hand-entered PayPal rate), we draw a straight line between the two amounts we verified and tag the result Estimated. It’s a reasonable read, not a checked quote. It only runs between half the lower verified amount and five times the higher one, and a provider with only one verified amount is left out rather than guessed at.

Many providers show a better “first-time” rate to new customers: a one-off promotion, not what you’d get on your second transfer or your tenth. A comparison that used those would favor whoever markets hardest, not whoever is cheapest to use, so we use standard rates only.

Because that kind of quote is easy to capture by accident, every hand-entered PayPal rate is checked against the mid-market rate for the day it was recorded. Any whose total cost is under 1% is flagged as a likely promotional quote and held for re-sourcing instead of being trusted, because real PayPal and Xoom costs run well above that.

No provider genuinely beats the mid-market rate, so a negative cost means something is off. Sometimes a stored quote has gone stale. Sometimes it’s only timing: the reference rate is published once a day, so a quote taken today can read a few tenths of a percent below a reference that is hours behind the market. We allow 0.5% for that, only for live quotes and quotes verified today. Anything older that reads negative is flagged as possibly stale.

Corridor compares quotes. It doesn’t move money. The Send buttons open the provider’s own site in a new tab, and the rate and fees you’re offered there may differ from what’s shown here.