Banknotes from several countries laid out

Money

Will my money work there

Inflation and real interest, what it costs to send money home, and whether people there can actually bank.

Inflation & Real Interest

What savings earn or lose in real terms: inflation, central-bank policy rates and deposit rates, with the real rate computed — by country, ranked.

GET /api/inflation.json

Cost of Sending Money Home

What a transfer really costs on your corridor — fee plus exchange-rate margin, average and cheapest provider — from the World Bank's quarterly survey.

GET /api/remittance.json

Banking Access

Whether a newcomer can open an account there, what they are asked for, the deposit guarantee, instant payments — and how widely adults bank at all.

GET /api/banking-access.json

Every figure here is computed, not collected

Nothing on this site is a crowdsourced estimate or an editorial top ten. Each tool runs a published dataset — World Bank, IMF, OECD, Eurostat, WHO, HUD — through an engine you can call yourself, and every JSON response carries a citation naming the source and the year it refers to. Where a figure is modelled rather than measured, the page says so.

Each tool above has a free JSON API and an MCP tool, listed on the card. See how it works or the ranked answers if you would rather start from a shortlist than a calculator.

Not sure which tool to start with? Ask the adviser what matters to you (Pro), and it will work through these figures for you.

What does money earn or lose there?

Inflation is the tax nobody legislates. Beside it, the central bank's policy rate and the rate banks actually pay on deposits — and the real rate the two imply, so a 5% account in a 7% economy reads as the loss it is.

Country 1 Country 2 Country 3 Country 4

Country	Inflation	Latest month	Policy rate	Deposit rate	Real deposit
🇬🇧 United Kingdom	3.9% (2025)	3.0%	3.8%	—	—
🇩🇪 Germany	2.2% (2025)	2.8%	2.3%*	—	—
🇹🇷 Türkiye	34.9% (2025)	32.1%	37.0%	57.6%	16.8%

Inflation is the latest annual consumer-price change published by the World Bank. Any projection at that rate is flat — a statement about the last year, not a forecast.
Real rates are ex post: the nominal rate less realised inflation (exact Fisher), computed only when the two figures describe the same year or adjacent years. The real policy rate pairs the newest BIS month with the World Bank's annual inflation figure.
Euro-area countries (DE, FR, IT, ES, NL, IE, PT, GR) carry the ECB's single policy rate; their inflation and deposit rates are their own.

Lowest inflation

🇱🇰 Sri Lanka -4.8%
🇳🇪 Niger -4.5%
🇹🇩 Chad -3.9%
🇫🇯 Fiji -1.4%
🇧🇫 Burkina Faso -0.6%
🇩🇯 Djibouti -0.3%
🇵🇦 Panama -0.2%
🇹🇭 Thailand -0.1%

Inflation and deposit rates: World Bank, latest year. Policy rate: BIS, newest month; * marks the ECB's single rate applied to euro-area members. Latest month: IMF CPI, year on year. Real rates are computed here by the exact Fisher relation only when both figures are from the same or adjacent years. Refreshed 2026-09-07. No BIS policy rate for Albania, Algeria, Andorra, Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belgium, Belize, Benin, Bhutan, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Brunei, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cabo Verde, Cambodia, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, DR Congo, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Estonia, Eswatini, Ethiopia, Fiji, Finland, Gabon, Gambia, Georgia, Ghana, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Iran, Iraq, Ivory Coast, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Latvia, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Malawi, Maldives, Mali, Malta, Mauritania, Mauritius, Micronesia, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Nepal, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Qatar, Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Suriname, Syria, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Togo, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Uganda, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Zambia, Zimbabwe. JSON

What does sending money home really cost?

The fee is the small part; the exchange-rate margin is the rest. The World Bank mystery-shops every major corridor each quarter and publishes both, per provider. This is that survey — 2025 Q3 — for your corridor, with the cheapest provider found.

From To Amount (USD)

Sending $500 from United Kingdom to India costs on average 1.12% ( $5.6); the cheapest provider surveyed charged 0.15%.

12 providers surveyed · average 1.91% for $200 and 1.12% for $500 · 2025 Q3.

Costs are the World Bank's quarterly mystery-shopping survey of providers on this corridor: the mean total cost (fee plus exchange-rate margin) of sending USD 200 and USD 500, and the cheapest provider found. Your own quote will differ by provider, payment method and day.
Quotes below USD 350 use the USD 200 survey figures and above it the USD 500 figures; the survey measures only those two amounts.

Cheapest countries to send from

🇧🇪 Belgium 3.1%
🇧🇭 Bahrain 3.3%
🇰🇼 Kuwait 3.5%
🇳🇴 Norway 3.7%
🇵🇱 Poland 3.7%
🇴🇲 Oman 3.9%
🇲🇾 Malaysia 4.0%
🇸🇬 Singapore 4.1%

Mean cost of a $200 transfer across each country's surveyed corridors.

World Bank Remittance Prices Worldwide (2025 Q3, CC BY 4.0), mean total cost across surveyed providers with non-transparent pricing excluded. Corridors are chosen by volume; a pair not surveyed returns no data rather than a guess. Refreshed 2026-09-04. JSON

Can you open an account there?

What a newcomer is usually asked for, whether a non-resident can open an account at all, how much of a deposit the state guarantees if the bank fails, and how fast money moves between banks. Hand-curated from deposit-guarantee schemes and regulators; each entry carries the page it rests on and the date it was checked. Not financial advice.

Country

🇵🇹 Portugal

Non-resident account: Restricted — some banks, or extra conditions
Usually asked for: Passport · Local tax number · Proof of address
In short: Every account rests on a NIF, and the tax authority issues one to a non-resident on a passport plus a document showing the address abroad; a third-country passport must also carry an entry visa, with EU exemptions.
Deposit guarantee: 100,000 EUR (about $112,994) per depositor per bank — Fundo de Garantia de Depósitos
Instant payments: MB WAY (2015) · RT1 / SCT Inst (2017) · TIPS / SCT Inst (2018)
EU basic account: Anyone legally resident in the EU may open a basic payment account here (Directive 2014/92/EU).
Adults with an account: 91.4% (2024)
Source: info.portaldasfinancas.gov.pt · 2026-09-17

For information only — not financial advice. Banks set their own onboarding policies and change them without notice; check with the bank before relying on any of this.
Access rules describe what major banks usually ask a newcomer for, not what any one bank will accept. Deposit guarantees are statutory limits per depositor per bank; e-money and payment-app balances are usually safeguarded rather than covered. Guarantees are converted to USD at the site's latest FX snapshot for comparison only — the scheme pays in its own currency.
One or more deposit-guarantee figures rest on secondary reporting; see depositGuarantee.confidence.

Opening an account from outside the country, or one that follows you between countries, is the International accounts tab — including which kinds are protected by a deposit guarantee and which are only safeguarded.

Can people there bank at all?

The share of adults with an account — at a bank or on a phone — from the World Bank's household survey, beside how much of the economy arrives as remittances. Where accounts are rare, cash is how things are paid for, and that changes what living there is like.

Country 1 Country 2 Country 3 Country 4

Country	Adults with an account	Remittances received (% GDP)
🇬🇧 United Kingdom	99.3% (2024)	0.1%
🇳🇬 Nigeria	63.3% (2024)	7.8%
🇮🇳 India	89.0% (2024)	3.8%

Findex is a triennial household survey (2021, 2024/25 waves); the survey year is shown with each figure. Account ownership says whether adults CAN bank, not whether a newcomer can open an account — that depends on residency and documentation rules this tool does not cover.

Fewest banked adults

🇳🇪 Niger 15%
🇹🇩 Chad 21%
🇱🇧 Lebanon 23%
🇳🇮 Nicaragua 23%
🇲🇬 Madagascar 24%
🇵🇰 Pakistan 27%
🇲🇷 Mauritania 27%
🇮🇶 Iraq 30%

Account opening and deposit guarantees: hand-curated over 186 countries, 136 with a published guarantee ceiling; 52 access rules were read on an official page and 134 from secondary reporting where none could be fetched (marked per row). Reviewed 2026-09-17. Instant payments: Project FASTT — survey year not recorded in this import, imported 2026-09-17. Findex and remittances refreshed 2026-09-07. JSON

Banking across borders

The kinds of account people use when their money crosses a border, and — the part that is easy to miss — what actually protects the balance in each. Whether you can open an account in a particular country is the Banking access tab.

Kind	Good for	Usually needs	What protects the money
Multi-currency e-money account	Holding and converting several currencies, receiving pay with local account details, spending abroad at close to the mid-market rate.	Opening usually needs residence in a supported country; no overdraft or credit; some countries and transfer corridors are excluded.	Usually SAFEGUARDED (kept apart from the firm's own money), not covered by a deposit guarantee scheme — unless the provider holds a banking licence where you signed up.
Licensed digital bank	A full current account opened in an app, often faster than a branch bank, with local payment rails.	Normally residents only, with a local address and tax number; some operate on a partner bank's licence.	Covered by the local deposit guarantee when the bank itself holds the licence; check whose licence it is.
International or expat bank	One account that follows you between countries, in major currencies, usually with an offshore booking centre.	High minimum balance or income, and fees below it; the account is often booked in a crown dependency or offshore centre, not where you live.	Covered by the scheme where the account is BOOKED (for example Jersey or the Isle of Man), which can be lower than the UK or EU limit.
US business account for a foreign-owned company	Receiving US-dollar revenue through a US company without living in the US.	Needs a US-registered entity and an EIN; several providers are technology firms rather than banks.	FDIC cover applies through the partner bank that actually holds the deposits, per bank and per ownership category.
Local bank account	Rent, utilities, a local salary and local instant payments; often required for a residence permit or tax registration.	Usually needs local residence, a local tax number or an in-person visit — see the country entry.	Covered by the country's deposit guarantee scheme, where one exists — see the country entry.

Safeguarded is not the same as guaranteed

An e-money or payment app usually holds your balance in a separate account at a bank, apart from the firm's own money. If the firm fails, that money is meant to be returned to you — but it is not covered by a statutory deposit guarantee scheme, there is no fixed compensation limit behind it, and getting it back can take time. A licensed bank's deposits are covered up to the country's limit, per depositor, per bank. The same brand can be one in one country and the other elsewhere, so check which licence your account is actually held under.

For information only — not financial advice. Banks set their own onboarding policies and change them without notice; check with the bank before relying on any of this.
Access rules describe what major banks usually ask a newcomer for, not what any one bank will accept. Deposit guarantees are statutory limits per depositor per bank; e-money and payment-app balances are usually safeguarded rather than covered. Guarantees are converted to USD at the site's latest FX snapshot for comparison only — the scheme pays in its own currency.

Tools in this section

Inflation & Real Interest →

Cost of Sending Money Home →

Banking Access →