Fifty per cent cheaper than what? Reading an exchange rate margin
Lloyds publishes its exchange rate margin on a page anyone can read. It starts at 2.60% on payments up to £25,000 and falls to 0.90% by the time you're moving a million. TSB publishes its own: 3.30% on euros, flat, whatever the size of the payment. Bank of Scotland matches Lloyds to the decimal point.
Three high street banks, three different answers, all of them public.
Which makes the most common sentence in my industry close to meaningless. We'll save you fifty per cent against the banks. Fifty per cent of which one?
Your bank's exchange rate margin is published. Go and look.
Lloyds tiers it by payment size: 2.60% up to £25,000, then sliding down through 2.10%, 1.60%, 1.50%, 1.35%, 1.25% and finally 0.90% in the £500,000 to £1m band. It describes the margin, in its own words, as “the difference between the Lloyds Bank exchange rate you pay and the rate available to us”.
TSB does it by currency instead, with no tiers at all. 3.20% on dollars and Canadian dollars. 3.30% on euros, Australian dollars, rand and New Zealand dollars. 3.40% on francs, yen and dirhams. It goes up to 3.65% on forints, pesos and lira. Same rate whether you're sending five thousand pounds or five hundred thousand.
Two things follow from that, and the second one is the awkward one.
A business banking with TSB and moving euros pays nearly four times what the same business would pay at Lloyds if it were big enough to reach the top band. And neither page carries a date, so the only honest thing anyone can say is which day they looked. I looked on 13th October 2026.
What half off actually buys you
Take a single payment of £1m.
At TSB's euro margin of 3.30%, the cost inside the rate is £33,000. At the bottom of Lloyds' tiering, 0.90%, it's £9,000. Twenty-four thousand pounds between two British banks on one transfer.
Now apply the claim. Half of TSB's 3.30% is 1.65%, which costs £16,500. Half of Lloyds' 0.90% is 0.45%, which costs £4,500. The identical promise, honoured in full, produces two numbers nearly four times apart.
It gets worse at the sizes most businesses actually deal in. On £250,000, half of TSB's euro margin is 1.65%, or £4,125. Lloyds' own published band at that size is 1.35%, or £3,375. So a provider who genuinely halves the bank rate, and can prove it, leaves you £750 worse off than if you had simply used a different high street bank.
Those figures are illustrative. They assume the published margin is what you'd actually get, they take the favourable end of Lloyds' bands, and they ignore the transfer fee that sits outside the rate. Every one of those assumptions runs in the banks' favour, which rather makes the point.
Three questions that settle it
Ask which bank, which band, which date. A saving is a comparison, and a comparison with no stated other side isn't a number, it's a mood. If the answer is “the banks” rather than a named institution, a payment size and a day, there is nothing there to check.
Ask for the exchange rate margin, not the saving. A provider quoting you 40 basis points over the mid-market rate has told you something you can verify against the market on the day. A provider quoting you fifty per cent off something they won't name has told you nothing, and the vagueness is doing work. We have written before about what the mid-market rate is and isn't, and about a published tariff that still hides the rate underneath it.
Ask for it in writing before you deal. The advertising rules already expect this. CAP rule 3.34 requires a comparison to be objective and verifiable, and the ASA's guidance is that where a reader can identify even one competitor, the advertiser should signpost the basis of the comparison somewhere clear and freely accessible. Most FX marketing does not.
We aren't going to quote you a percentage here either, and that's deliberate, because a saving figure with no stated reference point is precisely the thing this piece is about. What we will do is tell you the margin on your own trade, in basis points, before you deal and in writing, so you can hold it against the market yourself. It belongs with everything else an international payment costs you. To be plain about what we are: Pathfinder isn't directly authorised by the FCA. We work through authorised partners, they safeguard client money, and we run no book.
The strange part is that the banks are the transparent ones here. Lloyds, Bank of Scotland and TSB have each put the number on a public page. Nobody made them. It takes about a minute to find, and it is still the only side of the comparison that anyone has actually published.
Get in touch
If you'd like the margin on your own trades put in writing before you deal, ring us.
Pathfinder FX
1 Knights Court, Archers Way, Battlefield Enterprise Park, Shrewsbury, SY1 3GA
+44 (0)1743 290955
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