How we collect and rank money transfer rates

Plyna is operated by Ply Norwood LTD, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 17266586). We are an independent comparison service — we are not a money-transfer provider, and we are not owned by one. Plyna is not authorised or regulated by the FCA, and nothing on this site is financial advice.

Most comparisons show a headline exchange rate. That number is misleading, because a provider can advertise a great rate and quietly claw the cost back through a fee or a margin. We rank on the one figure that captures everything: how much your recipient actually receives.

For every provider, on a standard £1,000 transfer, we calculate:

recipient amount = (£1,000 − fee) × exchange rate × (1 − margin)

This folds the upfront fee and the exchange-rate margin into a single, comparable number, so the ranking reflects the real cost — not the marketing.

We compare every provider's effective rate against the mid-market rate— the real rate banks trade at between themselves, before any markup. It's the fairest possible benchmark, and the gap between it and a provider's rate is the hidden margin. We source the mid-market rate from public reference data (jsDelivr's exchange-rate feed, with fallbacks) at the time of collection.

We collect real provider quotes every day at around 08:00 UTC, using each provider's own public quote pages or official API for a £1,000 GBP transfer on each corridor we track. Every figure on the site is a dated snapshot of a real quote on a real day — never modelled, never estimated. The one exception is the clearly-labelled “Bank Estimate”, a representative high-street-bank baseline shown for context only.

Where a provider's rate is confirmed via an official API or a long-running, verified scraper, it's shown as confirmed. Where the rate is live but not yet independently verified, we mark it “pending independent verification” so you can weigh it accordingly. When we can't reliably collect a provider on a corridor, we show “Data unavailable” rather than guess.

Rankings are determined solely by the data. No provider can pay for a better position or for inclusion. Plyna may earn a referral fee if you start a transfer through a link on this site, but that never influences the order — the order is the recipient amount, full stop. Where a provider link is a commercial one, it is routed transparently and the ranking is calculated before any commercial consideration.

We take reasonable care to be accurate, but rates change constantly and always verify the final rate and fee directly with the provider before you transfer. Spot something wrong? Email hello@plyna.co.uk and we'll check it.