Open Emirates NBD's schedule of charges and you find something that looks like the end of the argument: a foreign currency remittance through online banking, mobile banking or an ATM costs nothing. The same transfer at a branch costs AED 78.75 on the standard account tiers — Executive and Beyond customers pay AED 73.50, and Beyond and UAE National accounts get one free branch transfer a month. A local currency remittance online is also free. Note the schedule itself is dated November 2023, so confirm before relying on it.
Set against an exchange house charging AED 25 for a South Asia transfer, or AED 57.50 to AED 100 for the UK, the bank appears to win outright.
It does not, necessarily, and the reason is that the published fee is one of three costs.
The three charges
1. The transfer fee. What the provider charges you to execute the instruction. This is the number in the advertisement and on the schedule of charges. It is easy to publish, easy to compare, and therefore competed down towards zero.
2. Correspondent and intermediary charges. What the banks in the middle take. Emirates NBD publishes these in a separate document from its main tariff, a per-currency schedule with a version code of 05/2026, and it explains the mechanism clearly. Correspondent charges apply where "charge code 'OUR' is selected", meaning you pay them. Under BEN or SHA, "beneficiary bank(s) and correspondent bank(s) charges may be deducted from the transaction amount", meaning the recipient absorbs them. For dirhams sent outside the UAE, the schedule notes that "a fee of AED 105 is paid as correspondent bank charges to UAE Central Bank".
Al Ansari's Key Facts Statement makes the equivalent disclosure in one sentence: "Depending on the receiving country, the transaction may incur additional fees from the intermediary and/or beneficiary banks."
3. The foreign exchange margin. The gap between the rate you are given and the rate the provider can buy at. None of the providers we examined discloses it. We checked Emirates NBD's schedule of charges and its correspondent bank charges document, Al Ansari's Key Facts Statement, LuLu's published material and Careem Pay's send-money pages, and found no statement of a spread or margin in any of them.
On a transfer of any size, the third charge is almost always the largest. It is also the only one you cannot look up.
OUR, SHA and BEN: a choice most people do not know they are making
When a bank sends an international wire, someone has to pay the intermediary banks. Three conventions govern who.
| Code | Who pays the intermediary charges | What the recipient sees |
|---|---|---|
| OUR | You, the sender | The full amount you sent |
| SHA | Split — you pay your bank, the recipient absorbs the rest | Less than you sent |
| BEN | The recipient, from the transferred amount | Less than you sent |
Emirates NBD offers all three. This matters more than it sounds, because if you are sending a fixed obligation, a mortgage payment, a school fee, a family transfer where a specific figure is expected — SHA or BEN means the amount arriving is unpredictable. OUR costs more and delivers what you sent.
Exchange house transfers to a bank account in a major corridor generally behave more like OUR, in that the quoted amount is what is expected to land, but the Al Ansari disclosure above makes clear that intermediary and beneficiary charges can still apply depending on the destination.
A trap in the comparison itself
Emirates NBD's schedule states that "All fees and charges are inclusive of Value Added Tax (VAT) or similar sales tax."
Al Ansari's Key Facts Statement quotes its bands as "plus 5% VAT".
So AED 78.75 at an Emirates NBD branch and AED 25.24 at Al Ansari are not directly comparable numbers, one includes VAT and one does not. It is a small adjustment and it is the sort of thing a fee-comparison table will silently get wrong.
What the exchange houses publish
Al Ansari's Key Facts Statement, at document version Feb-26, is the most useful published document in this market. It sets out fee bands by corridor group:
| Corridor | Charge |
|---|---|
| South Asia (India, Pakistan and similar) | Nil to AED 25.24, plus 5% VAT |
| Philippines and Indonesia | From AED 23.10, plus 5% VAT |
| USA and UK | AED 57.50 to AED 100 |
| Euro transfers | AED 69 to AED 100, plus 5% VAT |
| GCC | AED 40.25 to AED 50, plus 5% VAT |
| Cash payout | From AED 15, plus 5% VAT |
The document also states the documentation requirement — "Original valid ID such as UAE National ID or Passport with a valid UAE visa must be provided while performing any remittance transaction", and gives delivery times ranging from instant to three to seven working days depending on corridor and service.
What it does not contain is any statement of the rate it will give you. There is no margin, no spread, and no explanation of how the rate is set. The one place a rate is mentioned at all is the refund clause, which says cancelled transfers are returned "at the prevailing market buying rate or transaction rate whichever is lower" — a rule for unwinding a transfer, not a disclosure of what the transfer costs.
A note on the per-country table. Al Ansari also publishes a country-by-country fee table on its website. We attempted to extract it repeatedly and got materially different figures for the same countries across attempts — Egypt came back three different ways. The set of values is stable; the mapping of country to fee is not, through the tooling available to us. Rather than publish a figure we cannot stand behind, we have used the Key Facts Statement bands, which extracted cleanly and are versioned. If you need a specific corridor figure, read it off the page yourself.
LuLu publishes a service charges document that is an image-only scan with no readable text, so we could not extract any LuLu fee. LuLu also states on its site that "Prices are indicative and subject to change. Please visit our nearest branch for the latest prices."
The only comparison that works
Given that the largest of the three charges is unpublished by everyone, the published material cannot rank providers on cost. What works is a direct test.
- Pick a real amount and a real destination.
- Get a live quote from each provider within a few minutes of each other, on the same day. Rates move.
- Compare the amount that would arrive in the recipient's account, not the fee, not the rate.
- For a bank, check which charge code is being applied, because that determines whether the arriving amount is predictable at all.
- Repeat occasionally. Relative pricing between providers is not stable, and neither is the margin any of them applies.
That is more work than reading a table, and it is the only method that measures the thing you actually care about.
A structural point
The Ministry of Human Resources lists Al Ansari Exchange and LuLu Exchange among the approved institutions for the Wage Protection System, alongside banks and other financial institutions. The Central Bank's Exchange Business Regulation C 7/2025, effective 26 June 2025, makes WPS salary processing one of the four licensed exchange-business activities.
So for a large share of UAE expats, the exchange house handling the salary arriving is also the one selling the transfer out. That is not a criticism — it is a function of how the payroll infrastructure is built, but it does explain why the default choice is so often the incumbent, and it is a reason to price an alternative occasionally rather than never.
Segregated is not guaranteed
One difference between a bank and an exchange house that does not show up in pricing.
Exchange houses must place customer funds in "designated remittance intermediate account(s), opened with Bank(s) licensed by the Central Bank, on a daily basis or at latest before end of banking hours on next business day", held "solely for settling customers' Remittances with foreign correspondents and not for any other purposes". Stored value providers face an equivalent requirement under C 6/2020, including arrangements to establish a priority claim over the float in an insolvency.
That is segregation. It is real protection and it is not a compensation scheme — neither regulation establishes one. For money in transit over a day or two the distinction is largely academic. It matters if you park a balance anywhere.
EW+ View
The most useful thing to take from this is that a zero fee is a marketing position, not a price. Every provider in this market has to earn something on the transaction, and the ones charging nothing visibly are earning it on the rate. That is not a criticism of any of them; it is how the market is structured, and the structure is stable because the fee is easy to publish and the margin is not.
For an occasional transfer the difference between providers is unlikely to be worth much effort. For someone remitting a meaningful share of a salary every month, running the live comparison two or three times a year is worth real money, and it is the only way to find out.
The one piece of published information that genuinely changes behaviour is the branch-versus-online split: AED 78.75 against nothing, for the same instruction at the same bank. If you are still walking into a branch to send money, that is the easiest saving on this page.
Common questions
Not answerable from published material. The transfer fee is published, correspondent charges are published by some providers, and the foreign exchange margin — usually the largest of the three — is published by none of them. The only reliable method is to get live quotes from both within a few minutes and compare the amount that would arrive.
Because the fee is the visible, easily compared part of the price, and the margin on the currency conversion is not. Emirates NBD charges nothing for a foreign currency remittance through online or mobile banking and AED 78.75 at a branch. No UAE bank publishes its FX margin.
They set who pays the intermediary banks. Under OUR you pay them and the recipient gets the full amount. Under SHA the cost is split. Under BEN the recipient absorbs them from the transferred amount. If you are sending a fixed obligation such as a school fee, OUR costs more and is the only one that delivers a predictable amount.
Its Key Facts Statement, version Feb-26, publishes bands rather than per-country figures: nil to AED 25.24 plus 5% VAT for South Asia, from AED 23.10 plus VAT for the Philippines and Indonesia, AED 57.50 to AED 100 for the USA and UK, AED 69 to AED 100 plus VAT for euro transfers, AED 40.25 to AED 50 plus VAT for the GCC, and from AED 15 plus VAT for cash payout.
Three reasons. LuLu's fee document is an image-only scan with no readable text. Al Ansari's per-country web table extracted differently on repeated attempts. And no provider discloses its FX margin, which is the largest cost. A table built on the available material would look authoritative and mislead.
Emirates NBD states that all its fees and charges are inclusive of VAT. Al Ansari quotes its bands as plus 5% VAT. Comparing the two figures without adjusting compares different things.
Next steps
- If you are transferring at a branch, move to online or mobile, at Emirates NBD that is AED 78.75 against nothing for the same instruction.
- Get live quotes from two providers within a few minutes of each other and compare the amount that would arrive, not the fee.
- Check which charge code your bank applies, and use OUR when a specific amount has to land.
- When reading any published fee, check whether it is quoted inclusive or exclusive of VAT.
- Re-run the comparison two or three times a year — relative pricing is not stable.
Further reading on ExpatWealthPlus
- The cheapest ways to send money from the UAE
- Why you cannot send money out of the UAE with Wise
- Careem Pay and LuLu Exchange
- Al Ansari and LuLu: what each actually publishes
- Holding more than one currency in the UAE
Official sources
Every figure in this article is checked against the primary source. These are the places to verify the current position for yourself, since rates, rules and product terms change.
- Emirates NBD — schedule of charges →Foreign currency remittance free online, AED 78.75 at branch, VAT inclusive
- Emirates NBD — correspondent bank charges, version 05/2026 →How OUR, SHA and BEN work, and the per-currency correspondent schedule
- Al Ansari — Key Facts Statement, version Feb-26 →Fee bands by corridor, documentation and delivery times
- LuLu Money →The indicative-pricing statement and corridor coverage
- CBUAE — Exchange Business Regulation C 7/2025 →Licensed activities and the daily safeguarding requirement
- MoHRE — Wage Protection System →The approved institutions for salary processing