TransferWise: tiny discrepancy when sending money to Colombia

I recently used TransferWise to send GBP to COP and I have been surprised by a tiny discrepancy, 11 COP (~0.0022 GBP), between the amount the recipient received and what TransferWise advertised he would receive.

TransferWise support team explained me this difference as follow:

When sending from GBP to COP, we receive GBP from your side and we convert the amount to COP with the mid market rate.

However our partner in Colombia needs to receive USD from us, so we convert the amount in COP to USD with the rate our partner gives us.
We send them those USD and then they convert them to COP and send them to the recipient.

In your case what happen was the following:

You sent us 1,000 GBP, we took our fee and convert 974.43GBP to COP with the mid market rate at that moment: 1 GBP = 4,970.50 COP.
So that was 4,843,404.315 COP, however in COP there’s no cents so it got rounded down to 4,843,404 COP.

After that we converted to USD since our partner need to receive USD from us. The rate our partner gave us was 1 USD = 3,267.00 COP.

4,843,404 COP / 3,267.0 = 1,482.52341597 USD, rounded down to 1,482.52 USD, so we sent our partner that amount.

Once they received that amount they converted USD to COP, so 1,482.52 USD * 3,267.0 = 4,843,392.84 COP.

Again, in COP there’s no cents so that got rounded up to 4,843,393 COP.

I hope that explains the difference of 11 COP (~0.0022 GBP).

We are trying to fix this difference in order to show the correct amount from the beginning but is not an easy task.

In short, the USD amount sent by TransferWise to their partner in Colombia has been rounded down, which explains the difference.

This tiny discrepancy explained, TransferWise rates remain great and I recommend their services.