dataforge-labs/remittance-pricing-panel

Cross-border remittance pricing

What it costs to send money across nine major corridors, quoted per provider, several times a day. Each round captures 8 to 22 providers per corridor, including Wise, Western Union, PayPal, Xoom, WorldRemit, Instarem and a range of retail banks, with the rate, the fee, and the amount that would actually arrive.

The World Bank surveys remittance prices quarterly by mystery shopping. We could not find a high-frequency record of provider pricing anywhere, and quotes change far faster than quarterly.

Worst-versus-best spread on the same transfer runs from 2.5% to 8.8% depending on the corridor.

What is in here

name	one row is
e13_remittance_quotes	one provider's quote on one corridor: rate, fee, amount received, shortfall against the best in that round
e0_run_manifest	one collection window: polls, failures, coverage counters

Before you build on this

• The source is Wise's own public comparison service. Which competitors appear in a corridor is Wise's choice, competitor quotes can lag (see date_collected where present), and the publisher has an obvious interest in looking cheap. The bias is at least constant and visible, and is_wise_own_quote marks their own rows. For what it is worth, the feed does publish Wise losing: it was 3% behind Xoom on USD to MXN in our first round.
• The Wayback Machine holds occasional captures of Wise's comparison pages and at least one of the comparison API, from 2022. Those are scattered single points rather than a panel, so this is denser than anything that exists rather than the only record of it.
• shortfall_vs_best_pct is computed within a round, so it compares providers quoted at the same moment rather than against a daily benchmark.

Partitions are parquet, one file per collection window, under dataset/YYYY/MM/. This repo carries a FIXED 7-day sample (2026-08-25 to 2026-08-31) so you can check schema, coverage and quality before asking for more. It does not advance, so there is nothing to gain by re-downloading it. The full history is held privately, available on request.

from huggingface_hub import snapshot_download
import pandas as pd, glob

path = snapshot_download("dataforge-labs/remittance-pricing-panel", repo_type="dataset",
                         allow_patterns="e13_remittance_quotes/**")
df = pd.concat(map(pd.read_parquet,
                   glob.glob(f"{path}/e13_remittance_quotes/**/*.parquet", recursive=True)))

Coverage

e0_run_manifest lists every collection window with its poll counts and failure counts, and is published in full rather than windowed. Gaps between windows are real, cannot be filled in afterwards, and nothing here is interpolated.

License and contact

ODC-BY: use it freely, credit "DataForge (dataforge-labs)". Questions and requests for the full history via the discussions tab.