Paying a Pakistani Tutor From the UK

Three routes, and the shape of the cost in each

Every method of getting money from a UK account to a Pakistani one charges in two places: a visible fee and an invisible margin on the exchange rate. Providers compete loudly on the first and quietly on the second, which is why the cheapest-looking option is often not the cheapest.

The routes below are ordered by how most families end up using them for a monthly tutoring fee. None of them is wrong; they simply suit different amounts.

• Card billed in pounds: instant, receipt immediately, no non-sterling fee, and the card scheme's dispute process behind it.
• Card billed in rupees or dollars: same speed, plus a non-sterling transaction fee of close to 3% from most UK issuers and the network's own conversion.
• Transfer app such as Wise, Remitly, Xoom or Western Union: small or zero headline fee, the real cost sitting in the rate, and delivery to Pakistan usually within a day.
• Bank SWIFT transfer: a fixed charge from your bank, often around £20, sometimes a further deduction by a correspondent bank in the middle, and one to three working days.

Compare what lands, not what it costs

There is one instruction that saves more money than every other piece of advice on this page. Before sending anything, look up the mid-market rate for the day, then ask the provider how many rupees will actually arrive. The gap between those two numbers is the real fee, and the headline charge is usually the smaller half of it.

The arithmetic is worth doing once. A provider charging nothing but taking a 2% margin costs £3 on a £150 payment. A provider charging a flat £3 at the mid-market rate costs £3 on the same payment, and less than the first on anything larger. Above about £150 the flat fee wins, and it wins by more the bigger the payment gets, which is the entire argument for paying a term at a time rather than a month at a time.

What actually protects you

Any firm legally offering money transfers from the UK is authorised or registered with the Financial Conduct Authority, and appears on the Financial Services Register. Searching a firm's name there takes under a minute and is worth doing before the first payment rather than after a problem.

The strongest protection available to a UK consumer is Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act 1974, which makes a credit card issuer jointly liable with the supplier where the item costs more than £100 and no more than £30,000. It applies to overseas suppliers. A debit card gives you chargeback instead, which is a scheme rule rather than a statutory right, but still a real route to a refund.

What has no protection at all is a bank transfer to an individual's personal account, a payment sent as friends and family on any platform, or anything settled in cryptocurrency. If one of those is the only route being offered, that is information about the provider rather than about the payment system.

The receipt to insist on, before the first payment

Six things make a receipt useful six months later, and they are all easy to get at the start and awkward to get in the middle of a dispute. Ask once, keep the first one, and every subsequent month becomes a copy of it.

The single detail worth stopping over is the name. If the invoice comes from a company and the receiving account is in a person's name, ask why before sending anything. There are ordinary explanations, and there are not-ordinary ones, and you want to hear which this is while you are still a prospective customer.

• The institute's registered or trading name, not just a logo
• The same name on the receiving account
• The period covered and the number of classes it buys
• The amount and the currency, written explicitly
• A reference number you can quote back
• The date of issue

How we invoice UK families

We quote in two currencies, PKR 6,000 or USD 25 a month to start, and invoice for the month before it begins rather than after it ends. UK families pay monthly by card or send a term in one transfer, and the second is measurably cheaper for the reason set out above.

Nothing is due before the free demo class. That matters for a first payment across a border, because it means a family has watched a real lesson with the actual tutor before any money has left the country, and can decide on the teaching rather than on the website.