Monito's mission is to help you save on transfer fees and exchange rates

Monito is an award-winning digital start-up on a mission to save the world US$28 billion in excessive money transfer fees and bad exchange rates paid each year!

We're building the Booking.com for money transfers. We help people sending money abroad find, compare and review money transfer providers in real-time.

How Monito can save you money

You shop around before booking a flight or a hotel room so you can get the best value for you money, right? The same is true for money transfers: if you compare your options before making an international transfer, you can save money.

When you launch a comparison, we fetch the fees and exchange rates of all available providers to help you find the best option for your transfer. You can save up to 90% in comparison with your bank or the most expensive providers.

A simple idea to solve a complex problem

Every year, millions of people around the world send billions of dollars back home to support their families. However, a significant share of this money never reaches its recipients due to hefty transfer costs. Indeed, for every $100 sent, a recipient will only receive $92 on average according to the World Bank.

Average cost of sending money to different part of the world

But if everyone was using the cheapest available provider, we estimate that $28 billion could be saved each year in transfer fees and bad exchange rates.

How it all started

In February 2013, Monito's founders François, Laurent and Pascal attended a Startup Weekend in Lausanne, Switzerland. Our goal? To come up with a solution to the excessive fees levied on remittances. We quickly identified that the root of the problem was a lack of information, transparency, and awareness of the issue of hidden fees. Six months later, we launched Monito, a simple website allowing users to compare many different money transfer services at a glance.

The very next day, journalists started calling us with requests for interviews. Our website had struck a chord, as the problem we were trying to solve was huge in both numbers and importance for many different people. This sudden media attention kickstarted the website’s growth, with an increasing number of users coming to the website and more and more providers compared. This encouraged us to keep on working on the platform to make it more useful and easy to use.

In the summer of 2014, having won a few startup competitions and with our revenues (and expenses!) starting to rise, we decided to take a leap of faith into the unknown. We created a company and dedicated ourselves to the project full time. We continued to develop features to help our users make smarter decisions when sending money abroad, including the production of in-depth text and video reviews of various providers. In August 2016, exactly three years after the release of TawiPay, we decided to change the website’s name to Monito.

What lies ahead? We don’t know, but one thing’s for sure: we stay firmly committed to our mission of empowering our users to triumph over unfair transfer fees for the better.