Remittance Cost Tooling
Comparing the true cost of sending money home (visible fees, hidden FX spreads, and settlement time) across the corridors African families actually use.
In development TypeScriptFX dataOpen APIs
The problem, personally
Anyone in the diaspora knows the ritual: comparing transfer apps before sending money home, never quite sure where the cost hides. The advertised fee is only half the story. The FX spread quietly takes the rest. For families sending money monthly, percentage points compound into school fees.
What the tool does
It normalizes the comparison: for a given corridor (say USD → ZWG or USD → KES) and amount, it computes the total cost of each route as fee + spread against the mid-market rate, alongside settlement time. One honest number per provider instead of marketing arithmetic.
The actuarial angle
This is transparent pricing applied to a market that resists it: decomposing an all-in price into its components, exactly like separating expected losses from expense loads in ratemaking. Building it is teaching me more about real-world FX and payment risk than any textbook chapter.
The takeaway
Status: in active development. The newsletter will carry the launch. If you work in payments or have corridor data to share, I’d genuinely love to talk.