How to send money home to Nigeria from the UK

Sent on Friday, cleared on Tuesday

Funmi works nights in a care home in Manchester. Every month, on payday, she sends part of her wages to her mother in Lagos — school fees for her younger siblings, the rent, sometimes an emergency she hears about on a Sunday call. The transfer goes out on a Friday afternoon. Her mother calls on Tuesday to say the money has cleared. Four working days. By the time it arrives, the bill it was meant to cover has already been borrowed against.

That four-day wait is not a glitch. It is the expected outcome of a payment chain built before the internet — one that charges Funmi for the privilege of being slow, and hides part of what it charges inside the exchange rate.

The global average cost of sending USD 200 stands at 6.36% of the amount sent — more than double the 3% target the United Nations has set for all remittance corridors by 2030. Through traditional banks specifically, that average reaches 9.50% on the same send.

— World Bank, Remittance Prices Worldwide, Q3 2025 and Q1 2025

Why a bank transfer to Nigeria still takes days

A standard UK-to-Nigeria bank transfer does not travel in a straight line. It passes through a chain of correspondent institutions — the sender's UK bank, a clearing bank with a Nigerian relationship, a Nigerian correspondent, and sometimes a fourth intermediary depending on the destination account. Each link adds processing time: a compliance screening pass, a booking window that closes in the afternoon, a settlement cycle that does not restart until the next business morning. A standard SWIFT wire takes one to five working days to settle, and a Friday send routinely lands the following Tuesday after weekend cut-offs pause the chain for two days.

The speed problem runs alongside a less visible cost problem. Most traditional banks do not quote their full fee upfront. The headline transfer charge is real, but the exchange rate offered to the sender typically carries a separate mark-up extracted through the rate itself — not shown as a line item. Digital providers have made the UK-to-Nigeria corridor far more competitive in recent years, but the bank route still averages 9.50% globally on a USD 200 send. The chart below shows where each channel sits against the UN's 3% SDG target.

Source: World Bank, Remittance Prices Worldwide, Q1 2025. Banks = average across bank-channel providers. Digital providers = average across online/app-based providers. SDG target = UN Sustainable Development Goal 10.c by 2030.

How Spondula moves the same payment

Spondula is a global money network — not a bank, not a remittance app, but a payment network built on its own rails so that a send from Manchester to Lagos does not have to pass through a correspondent chain or wait for a cut-off window to open.

On the network, Funmi holds GBP-S — a sterling-referenced token that moves directly between wallets. When she sends to her mother, the GBP-S settles on the network in seconds. The rate is visible before the send is confirmed, not buried in an exchange rate revealed at the end of a form. There is no correspondent-bank chain in the middle and no Friday cut-off waiting to push the payment into next week.