Sending money to Cape Verde

Every guide to moving money abroad tells you to hunt down the best exchange rate. For Cape Verde that advice is close to useless, and following it sends you looking in entirely the wrong place.

We have been moving build money to Sal since 2022, first through an ordinary bank and then through Wise, which is what we use now. This is how it actually works, including one thing that Wise's own website gets wrong.

Can you send Cape Verdean escudos with Wise?

No.

This is worth stating plainly, because Wise's own marketing pages suggest otherwise. There is a page headed "Send money to Cape Verde". It shows a live sterling-to-escudo rate. There is a button underneath it that says send money.

Wise's help pages tell a different story. They list every currency the service supports — forty-nine of them, some you can both send and receive, some you can only send — and the Cape Verdean escudo appears on neither list. The rate on the marketing page is arithmetic rather than an offer: it is the euro rate with the peg applied to it, which is a number anyone can calculate and nobody can book.

If you go looking for a way to send escudos, you will not find one. That is not you failing to find the right button.

So how does the money actually get there?

In euros.

You hold your own currency in Wise, convert it to euros at the prevailing Wise rate, and send euros to your bank in Cape Verde. The bank converts them into escudos when they land.

Cape Verde sits outside SEPA, the European payments area, so that euro leg travels over the SWIFT network rather than as an ordinary European transfer. That matters for what it costs, and we come back to it below. It has not mattered much for speed: ours usually arrive within the hour, which is quick for that route.

Which exchange rate should you actually watch?

The one from your own currency into euros. It is the only one that can move.

The Cape Verdean escudo is pegged to the euro at a fixed 110.265 to one, and has been since the euro replaced the Portuguese escudo. This is not a market rate that drifts a little each day. It is a fixed rate, underwritten by a credit facility from the Portuguese government, and your bank in Cape Verde will convert at it today, next month and next year.

So the second half of the journey is settled before you begin. Everything worth your attention happens on the first half, turning your own money into euros — and unlike the second, that is a rate you can choose your moment on rather than simply accept. Sterling can sit in Wise for as long as you like before you convert it.

This is the part most people get backwards. They watch the rate at the far end, where nothing can happen, and pay no attention to the near end, where everything does.

Do you need a euro account in Cape Verde?

Probably not. We had one, and closed it.

Euro-denominated accounts are straightforward to open in Cape Verde, and for a while we ran one alongside an escudo account, on the reasoning that euros arriving into a euro account avoid a conversion. That reasoning is sound as far as it goes. What it misses is that you already have a euro account, because Wise is one.

So the local euro account was doing nothing that Wise was not doing better, and we closed it. Euros wait in Wise. The escudo account stays, because escudos are what you spend on the island.

What does it cost?

Less than the alternatives, in our experience. We moved to Wise partway through the build after learning what ordinary bank transfers cost on international payments, and among the methods we have tried nothing since has been cheaper.

There are three charges, and only the first is the one everybody compares.

Converting your money into euros. Ours costs 0.25% plus a flat charge of around 38p. We treat this as its own step and do it when the rate suits us, rather than when a payment happens to be due.

Sending the euros on. Charged separately, and this is the SWIFT leg. Wise offers a choice here: a lower fee, where the intermediary banks handling the payment may take their own cut as it travels, or a higher fixed fee that covers them. We pay the lower one. A recent transfer of 2,000 euros cost 5.69 in Wise's fees — a shade under three tenths of a percent.

The receiving bank's charge. Your bank in Cape Verde takes something for handling an incoming international payment, and this one varies. It is the only part of the journey we cannot see before we send, and no amount of research will tell you what yours will be.

So check your first transfer at both ends. Compare the euros Wise says it sent against the euros your bank actually credited, and you will know your real cost before you are moving serious money. It is better to learn that on a small payment than on a large one.

What we do now

Sterling sits in Wise until the rate is somewhere we are content with, and then becomes euros. The euros stay in Wise until there is something to pay for. When there is, they go to the escudo account in Cape Verde, usually landing the same hour, and the bank converts them at the peg.

No euro account on the island. No rate to watch at the far end. One place to look when we want to know what we are holding.

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We use Wise for this ourselves — it is how the money for this build has moved since 2022. The link above is a plain one: no tracking, no referral code, and we earn nothing if you use it. If that ever changes, this paragraph will say so.

Fees quoted here are ours, as at September 2026, and yours will differ. The peg is fixed and the routing is structural, so those should outlast this page. The figures will not.