Methodology: how the directory is built

Profiles do not include FCA Register data: the FCA’s terms do not allow its Register to feed another website’s tables. Profiles link to the Register and our live lookup instead. A profile is eligible for search indexing only when it is in our publishing plan, has a Companies House identity or a provider regulatory statement, and has sending-service quotations across at least three of countries, payout methods, fees, limits and delivery times. This is our publishing safeguard, not a Google quality score. Incoming-only terms and a single availability quotation do not meet it. Other profiles remain available in the directory but are not submitted for search indexing.

Built by software, not by reviewers

Nobody at IMTUK tests providers, makes transfers, or reviews profiles by hand. We say this plainly because it shapes what the site can and cannot tell you: it reports what the public record and a provider’s own website say, and nothing else. It does not rate, rank or recommend providers.

What the comparison adds

The provider comparison brings quoted service terms and matched public records together for the providers you select. Source headings, conditions and dates stay with each statement. Receiving-payment statements are excluded from the sending-service comparison. It does not turn different routes, products or funding methods into equivalent prices.

The quote cost checker uses the figures you enter and a dated reference rate to calculate a comparison. Neither tool tests a provider, verifies a marketing claim, recommends a firm or supplies a live transfer quote.

Where the facts come from

• Companies House. Company number, incorporation date, registered office, persons with significant control and filed accounts. Refreshed weekly.
• Financial Ombudsman Service. The Ombudsman’s half-yearly complaints data for the two latest periods: new cases, the share upheld in the consumer’s favour and cases settled proactively, copied as published under its own headings. A business is linked to a provider only when the Ombudsman publishes it under exactly the registered company name we hold from Companies House. The figures cover the whole company and all its products, and the Ombudsman publishes only businesses with at least 30 new and 30 resolved complaints in the period. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
• The provider’s own regulatory statement. The sentence on a provider’s website saying who regulates it, usually with its FCA reference number and company number. We quote it word for word, label it as the provider’s own claim, and link to the FCA Register so you can check it. Where the statement gives a company number, that is how we find the company at Companies House.
• FCA Register look-ups. The “Check a provider” page hands your search to the FCA’s own Register when our API connection is not enabled. If that connection is enabled, a visitor's search returns matches exactly as the Register returns them; results may be cached for up to one hour. Register data is not copied into provider profiles. The FCA does not endorse this site.
• Ownership, accounts and filings. For each matched company: its corporate owners, followed up the chain only while there is a single owner registered at Companies House; previous names; registered charges; recent filings; and headline figures (turnover, profit or loss, net assets, cash, average employees) read from the latest accounts when they were filed in tagged, machine-readable form. Figures are copied as filed, for the latest period in the accounts, and never estimated. Individuals are not shown.
• Change log. Each week software compares every Companies House record with the previous week’s and logs what changed on the profile, such as a new registered name, status, registered office or accounts date, and notes when the Ombudsman publishes new complaints figures.
• What providers say about their service. Software reads up to twelve official product and help sources per provider, including selectable text in official PDF terms, using configured source links and links discovered on the provider’s own pages and help subdomains. It keeps sentences on eight topics (service availability, where it sends money, how recipients are paid, delivery times, fees, limits, customer-money protection, and identity documents), word for word, with the page each came from. It drops marketing superlatives, promotions, other products (cards, loans, savings) and claims about other firms. Stored quotations are filtered again when displayed, so improved extraction rules also apply to earlier imports, including corrected topic classifications. Nearby headings, questions and table columns are retained when they explain a quotation. A table row keeps its route beside its price or time; privacy safeguards, document-processing times, domestic payments, first-transfer promotions and incomplete examples are excluded. Context notes identify business pages, receiving payments, destination-specific pages and starting prices without rewriting the quotation. Nobody checks the sentences by hand, and they are always shown as the provider’s own words.
• Published brand notices. Explicit statements about an acquisition or rebrand are copied from a configured primary company source and labelled with its publisher, link and fetch date. A successor’s prices and capabilities are not assigned to the former brand. Missing quotations mean the collection has a gap, rather than that a provider does not offer a service.
• Logos. The icon each provider’s own website publishes, saved by software and refreshed weekly. Logos are trade marks of their owners and are shown only to identify each provider.
• Reference exchange rates. Daily mid-market rates against the pound from the Frankfurter API, which blends central bank publications. A currency is shown only when at least three central banks contribute, and the table is withdrawn if the latest publication is more than five days old. They are reference benchmarks, not personalised provider quotes. Providers may use a mid-market rate with a separate fee; their rate can differ from this once-daily reference.
• The provider’s own website and terms. Countries served, payout methods, fees, limits, ID requirements and how customer money is safeguarded.

The rules the software follows

• Company, complaint and register facts are copied from the official source by ordinary code. AI is never used to produce, recall or summarise them.
• Details from providers’ own websites are found by plain pattern matching, not AI, and kept word for word with the page they came from.
• Anything that could reflect badly on a firm — a cancelled or restricted permission, a requirement imposed by the FCA, complaint figures — is shown exactly as the source records it, with a link and a date. The site adds no description, judgement or commentary of its own.
• Every block of a profile shows when it was last fetched.
• If a source cannot be reached or a check fails, the site shows nothing for that block rather than an older or estimated value.
• AI was used to build the site’s software and to draft its explanatory pages (this page, the glossary and the questions and answers). It does not write or edit any provider’s profile data.

How we measure the cost of a transfer

The checker estimates a transfer's cost by comparing the recipient payout with what the customer's total spend would have bought at the published daily reference rate. Total spend includes any fee charged on top. A daily reference is a benchmark, not a personalised quote or proof of a provider's exact margin. The calculation in full.

Questions to confirm for your transfer

Each profile has a checklist tailored to its provider category and the service topics collected on that profile. A quotation is evidence of what the provider published, not confirmation that the terms apply to every transfer. Shared-company links are calculated from matching Companies House company numbers; they do not imply identical products or prices. These checks are generated by software, not from test transfers.

Fetch dates describe when software read a source. They are not publication dates or evidence that the underlying facts changed, so they are not used as profile modification dates in structured data or sitemaps.

Changes and corrections

Each profile keeps a timeline of what changed and when. If you find an error, tell us; corrections are logged publicly.