Watch Monito's Video About The Best Way To Send Money To The Philippines

In this video, ibabahagi namin sa inyo ang pinaka da bes na tool baga po kayo magsend ng money para sa inyong mga mahal sa buhay po.

There are plenty of options when it comes to sending money to the Philippines, and the best money transfer provider for you will depend on a number of things. This could be how much you're sending, the currency you're exchanging into pesos, the way in which you'll be paying the money, for example, via your credit card.

And finally, how your recipient or loved one will receive the money, for example, via their GCash or PayMaya wallet. All of these things will affect the cost of your transfer and the amount of money your recipient receives.

Western Union is typically the most popular provider for sending money to the Philippines, but they're not always the cheapest. So in this video, we're also going to do a live comparison of Western Union to other providers to see if there are better options out there.

Your first step should be to compare the currency you're exchanging to the peso. This is super simple to do and a good way to protect your money and make sure you get the best deal. A quick check of Monito dot com will show the current mid-market exchange rate, which is really just a fancy term for the official exchange rate. 

And we can see right now that £1, which is my currency, equals 67.16 pesos. As a side note, you can actually set up an alert on Monito dot com to tell you when the peso is going up or down, which is a pretty awesome and a cool way just to make sure that your recipient or loved one is going to get as much money as possible. So we check this because even though it's the official exchange rate, most providers don't offer you anywhere near this number, and that's how they make money from your transfer, with some providers making a lot of money.

Meaning unfortunately, if you're not careful, the person you're sending money to may end up receiving a lot less than is fair. I know this might seem a bit confusing, and trust me, it's OK. I was just as confused as you might be, so let's look at the Western Union website and see how much it would cost if I sent my friend in the Philippines £1,000 and because we know from the Monito search that we did earlier, the exchange rate is £1 to 67.16 pesos. So technically, my friend in the Philippines should receive 67,000 pesos or around that, at least.

Now, according to Western Union, if I send my money via credit card or debit card and my friend picks it up in cash, they'll receive 65,441 pesos, which is not great. In fact, that's about fifteen hundred pesos less than if the transfer was made at the mid-market rate, which is around £20.

So we're talking a £20 difference between the Western Union exchange rate and the official exchange rate that we checked earlier. That's not good, but also to be expected because I've chosen two very expensive money transfer options, cash pick-up and paying with a credit or debit card.

Typically, cash is a more expensive option when sending money abroad, so let's try another option. I'll change cash pick-up to bank account and credit or debit card to bank transfer, and we can now see that the exchange rate has improved and that my friend will get 66,645 pesos.

That's definitely better, but the question is, can we do even better? And to find out we can use our Monito comparison engine and compare Western Union to other providers. As you can see, there are few options available across various transfer methods for cash pickup.

We can see Small World, WorldRemit and MoneyGram with Western Union being at the bottom. And while these are the cash pick-up providers for me, you may see different providers depending on your transfer needs. And if cash pick-up is your preferred option then we did some research and discovered that WorldRemit is one of the best providers for cash in the Philippines, they have over 15,000 locations. So while we can't guarantee they'll be the cheapest for you, it's very likely they'll be the most convenient. If my friend receives his money via a bank account, we can see that SmallWorld are the best offer, although XE are at the top as they're featured, and if we scroll down, we can see Western Union are towards the bottom. But they're just 300 pesos less than Small World if we transfer our money this way.

However, if I send my money via cash with Western Union, my friend would have lost out on over 15 hundred pesos then if I sent my money with Small World. And it's not just Western Union, there are other well-known companies like PayPal, as well as high street banks such as Barclays and HSBC that are very expensive when it comes to transferring money abroad. 

Once you’ve decided which provider you're going to use to send your money to the Philippines, you're just going to need to get a few details of the person you're sending money to. If you're sending money to their bank account, you'll need their full name, address, bank name and account number, which is usually around six to 18 digits. 

If you're sending to a mobile wallet, you'll need their phone number starting with the country code, which in the Philippines is plus 63. I also recommend that you have your government issued ID handy, so if you're in the UK like me, this could be a passport or driver's license.

And you may also be asked to take a selfie to verify your I.D.. And although verification processes like this one may seem annoying, they are important to help keep your data safe and your money secure. Based on our research and the data we've compiled through our comparison engine, the cheapest and fastest provider to the Philippines is typically Azimo and Remitly, the best rated are Wise and TransferGo. And the best cash pickup network is WorldRemit. However, when it comes to sending money, nothing is ever set in stone. And whether it's your first time sending money to the Philippines or your tenth, I recommend you always visit Monito dot com beforehand and use our comparison engine to make sure you get the best deal possible, it’s free, and it'll only take a few minutes and actually might save you some money. I hope you enjoyed today's video to learn more about Western Union. Check out this full review here.

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