The Monito Score Methodology: How It Works

The Monito Score is the money transfer industry's gold standard for evaluating the best companies to send money and remittances overseas.

It is a composite evaluation based on over 30 criteria organised into four categories, aiming to answer the key questions that consumers have when comparing the best money transfer companies: Which provider can I trust? Which offers the best service quality, fees, and exchange rates? And which has the highest customer satisfaction?

Explore the Monito Score and its research below to see how we make informed recommendations about money transfers and international personal finance —

Background

Remittances and overseas banking play a significant role in facilitating the ease of life for those who choose to leave their countries of origin. The growth in the number of migrants around the world, combined with the increasing frequency of cross-border movements, has built up the need for a comprehensive evaluation of the quality of international money transfers.

Our Four Categories

To this end, the Monito Score was developed to provide a composite score of 30+ criteria organised into four categories, which are used to evaluate the best money transfer companies. By analysing these categories, the Monito Score provides a comprehensive view of the best options available for managing and sending money abroad.

Trust & Credibility make up the first category used in the Monito Score. This category considers factors such as licensing, security, and regulatory compliance. The second category, Service Quality, includes measures such as website functionality, customer service quality, and user experience. Fees & Exchange Rates are the third category, which considers the overall cost of the money transfer, including pricing and exchange rate transparency. Lastly, the customer satisfaction category examines reviews and feedback from customers.

Reliable Data for Evidence-Based Choices

The Monito Score aims to protect consumers from a lack of transparency from money transfer companies, banks, and other traditional providers. It achieves this by providing actionable recommendations, which you can find with our comparison engine or by reading our extensive portfolio of guides.

To ensure the rigour and independence of the Monito Score, we gather data from primary sources, such as Terms and Conditions contracts, fee schedules, public company reports, and collections of customer reviews. The data and analysis used by our experts always undergo peer review prior to publication. Our ultimate goal is to support evidence-based decision-making for migrants who earn, manage, and send money abroad.

Methodology: International Money Transfer Comparison

To evaluate the performance of international money transfer companies, we have developed our proprietary Monito Score, which is a comprehensive system that ranks companies across four key categories.

Within these categories, we use over 30 carefully calibrated criteria to provide the most balanced and accurate comparisons, trusted by industry experts, non-profits, and migrants worldwide.

Below, we break down the four performance indicators in greater detail:

• Trust & Credibility (legal compliance);
• Service Quality (usefulness and user-friendliness);
• Fees & Exchange Rates (pricing and transparency);
• Customer Satisfaction (peer recommendations).

Together, the full Monito Score works to help migrants make informed decisions about their financial needs when sending money abroad.

Trust & Credibility

The Trust & Credibility category of the Monito score aims to assess the reliability and safety of international money transfer providers based on four criteria, including their background, security measures, company size, and pricing transparency. Below, we outline the data that we compile to generate the category score.

Service Quality

At Monito, we test provider services firsthand. Our Service Quality score is primarily based on our Agony Index, which reflects the number of barriers a user experiences when trying to complete various tasks on the provider's platform. Below, we walk through all of the data we take into account to calculate a company's service quality score.

Fees & Exchange Rates

When scoring international money transfer providers, we assess how competitive their fees and exchange rates are compared to other services.

To calculate a score for this category, we use data from hundreds of thousands of searches on Monito's comparison engine. Our comparison engine reads the live rates and fees of every available provider (factoring in for promotional pricing). This data allows us to determine how frequently a service is ranked as either the cheapest option or as a competitive choice. Based on this information, we can calculate a score that reflects the provider's pricing competitiveness.

Customer Satisfaction

The Customer Satisfaction scoring category provides an overview of how satisfied existing users are with a particular international money transfer provider. This is an important consideration in the decision-making process for choosing a provider, as first-hand endorsements can offer valuable insights into the usefulness and user-friendly quality of the service provided.

To calculate this sub-score, we gather and analyze data from Trustpilot, the App Store, and the Google Play Store. The ratings from these sources are weighted based on the number of reviews, which helps to provide a more accurate representation of the overall customer satisfaction.

We also do not take into account the ratings from our sources if their number of reviews is too low. We do this to prevent a small minority of one group of reviewers (less than 10) from skewing results.

Producing the Final Results

To calculate the comprehensive Monito Score, we first assign a score for each sub-criterion (i.e. number of customers). These sub-criterion scores are then weighted based on their importance and combined to produce an overall criteria score (i.e. Company Size).

Then, the criteria scores are averaged into an overall score for their relevant category (i.e. Trust & Credibility). Finally, we take the average of the sub-scores from the four main categories to determine the provider's final Monito Score.

Comprehensive Peer Review

Once the Monito Score has been calculated, a second reviewer repeats the entire review process to ensure its accuracy and integrity. This involves researching every data point, cataloging an agony index, and cross-referencing the results to ensure consistency between the two reviewers.

Through the peer-review process, we ensure that the Monito Score is comprehensive, reliable, and unbiased. This approach enables us to provide consumers with a trustworthy and transparent evaluation of each money transfer service, empowering them to make informed decisions when sending money abroad.

A Benchmark Study of 10 Leading Money Transfer Services by Monito

In August 2018, Monito partnered with the user-testing platform UserBrain to conduct a benchmark study on 10 leading money transfer services. The study involved analyzing over 50 user tests to identify the critical factors that contribute to a positive or negative user experience when sending money online.

Using 10 specific criteria related to the user experience, we evaluated the providers and identified TransferWise, TransferGo, and CurrencyFair as the top three companies offering the best user experience. This evaluation was based on rigorous analysis of user data, allowing us to provide evidence-based recommendations to consumers looking for reliable and user-friendly money transfer services.