There’s a number on every international transfer your bank processes that you almost certainly haven’t seen.
It isn’t on the receipt. It isn’t in the fee breakdown nor is it disclosed in the SMS confirmation. Yet, it exists and it costs you real money. The system has been designed for decades to make sure you never quite notice it.
It’s called the FX spread. And on a $20,000 transfer, it can quietly cost you ₦640,000.
What is FX spread?
There is a real exchange rate between currencies — the rate that exists in global markets at any given moment, also called the mid-market rate. It’s the rate you see on Google when you search “USD to NGN.” It’s the rate large institutions use when they trade currencies with each other.
It is also, almost certainly, not the rate your bank gave you.
When your bank converts your money, they apply their own rate. That rate is the mid-market rate plus a margin. The margin is the spread. It’s the bank’s cut for doing the conversion — and unlike a transfer fee or a wire fee, it doesn’t appear as a separate line. It’s baked into the rate you see.
You don’t notice it because there’s nothing to compare it to. Your bank’s app doesn’t show you the mid-market rate sitting next to their rate. They just show you their rate, present it as “the” rate, and process the transfer.
How much does FX Spread cost you
A typical bank in Nigeria adds somewhere between 2% and 4% above the mid-market rate on USD transfers. Sometimes more, depending on the corridor, the size of the transfer, and how much friction the customer is presumed to tolerate.
That sounds small, but it isn’t.
On a $1,000 transfer, a 3% spread costs you roughly ₦48,000. On a $10,000 supplier payment, it costs you ₦480,000. On a $20,000 transfer — the kind a mid-sized importer might run several times a quarter — it costs you ₦960,000 at the high end, ₦640,000 at the conservative.
Across a year of regular business payments, this is a real line item. It’s just not a line item anyone shows you.
What transparency should actually look like
Banks don’t show FX spread because that’s how it has always worked and the small businesses and families sending remittances have not had the leverage to demand otherwise. However, our model is to show you the FX spread before every transaction.
When you initiate a transfer on Oneremit.co, you see two numbers: the current mid-market rate, and the rate we’re offering you. You see the difference. You see what the spread costs. And you make the decision with the information that affects you most clearly visible.
This is not a feature we built for marketing reasons. It is the floor of what a customer should be told before they move their money. The mid-market rate is the customer’s reference point. Withholding it is withholding context. Withholding context is, in practice, withholding the truth about what they’re being charged.
If our rate isn’t the best available on a given day, we’d rather you see that than not.
Our baseline
Most fintech innovation in payments gets sold as a new capability — a new feature, a faster rail, a clever bit of automation. Transparency isn’t that. Transparency is the absence of something. The absence of buried fees. The absence of obscured math. The absence of the small daily decisions banks have made for decades to keep customers from understanding what they’re being charged.
We don’t think showing the mid-market rate is impressive. We think it’s owed. It’s what the platform should have been doing the whole time.
That’s not a feature. That’s a baseline.
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