Sending money from Europe to Morocco and Turkey

Here is the first thing a eurozone sender discovers: the cheap, fast, boring bank transfer you use for rent and utilities stops at the edge of Europe. The European Payments Council counts 36 SEPA scheme countries for euro credit transfers, and neither Morocco nor Turkey is on it. So the moment your euros are headed for Casablanca or Izmir, you’ve left the tidy part of the system.

What follows is how to think about that gap. Not a ranking of companies, because prices move weekly and anything we printed would be stale. A way of seeing where the money goes.

Why SEPA doesn’t carry you the whole way

SEPA is an agreed set of euro payment schemes. It works because banks across its members committed to the same rules and the same formats. Morocco and Turkey didn’t sign up. A transfer to them is a different animal.

Three routes exist in practice. Your bank can send a SWIFT payment, which may hop through a correspondent bank before landing. A transfer company can take your euros into its own European account, then pay out of a local account in dirhams or lira, so the money never really crosses the border. Or a cash-pickup network can hand notes to your relative at a counter. Each has its own price tag, and the headline number on the first screen is rarely the whole one.

We keep the plumbing short here and stay with the two destinations.

The advertised price versus the price that arrives

The World Bank runs a Remittance Prices Worldwide database. Its Germany to Morocco page, for the third quarter of 2025 (data collected in August 2025), shows an average total cost of 4.11% for sending the equivalent of 200 US dollars. That splits into an average fee of about 2.86 euros and an exchange-rate margin of 2.06%.

Look at that split again. Around half the cost is a margin you never see on a receipt. A provider that says “no fees” isn’t charging nothing; it’s charging in the rate. That’s legal and common. It’s also precisely why the fee line alone tells you almost nothing.

Two caveats. That’s one corridor in one quarter, and an average across many providers, so your own deal could be far better or far worse. And we couldn’t pull a clean figure for Turkey from the same database, so we won’t pretend to one. Check the World Bank pages for your own corridor and note the quarter shown at the top.

A worked example (illustrative numbers)

Say a sender in Germany wants 400 euros to land in a Moroccan account. Suppose the true mid-market rate that day is 10.80 dirhams per euro. That’s a made-up figure to keep the sums clean; look at the live EUR to MAD page for real ones. At mid-market, 400 euros would be 4,320 dirhams. Nobody gets that. Here are three made-up offers:

Offer (illustrative)	Fee	Rate margin	Dirhams received	Lost vs 4,320
A: “zero fee”	0 EUR	2.5%	4,212.00	108.00
B: small fee, tight rate	3 EUR	0.6%	4,261.87	58.13
C: bank SWIFT payment	15 EUR	2.0%	4,074.84	245.16

Offer A looks best on the landing page and is second best in the pocket. Offer C, the one most people default to because they already have the app, costs more than four times what B does. And C assumes no intermediary bank takes a slice on the way, which with SWIFT is possible and not always disclosed up front.

Build one habit: before you press send, ask for the amount the recipient will receive, in dirhams or lira, then divide by the mid-market rate. That ratio is your real cost.

The Moroccan dirham: managed, not frozen

Bank Al-Maghrib, the central bank, describes the dirham as pegged to a basket of two currencies. Since 13 April 2015 the euro has carried 60% and the US dollar 40%, up from 80% and 20% before that. Since 9 March 2020 the dirham is allowed to move within a band of 5% either side of its central rate; before January 2018 the band was only 0.3%, then 2.5% until that 2020 change.

For a euro sender, the 60% euro weight is decent news. Because the basket leans toward your currency, the euro to dirham rate is steadier than you’d see between two free-floating currencies. The pair still wobbles, mainly when the euro and dollar swing against each other, since the dollar slice is 40%. Month to month, though, nothing like Turkish drama.

Bank Al-Maghrib also publishes a daily reference rate and deals with market-maker banks. Translation: there’s an official anchor, and your provider’s rate will sit some distance from it. That distance is the margin we just measured.

One scale detail worth a pause. Money sent home by Moroccans abroad reached about 122 billion dirhams in 2025, according to the country’s Foreign Exchange Office as reported by Morocco World News, up 2.6% on the year before. That’s a vast flow, which is why so many competing channels exist. Competition is on your side. Use it.

The Turkish lira: a different problem

Turkey isn’t a basket story. The Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye (CBRT) sets a one-week repo rate as its main tool. It cut that rate by one percentage point, from 37% to 36%, on 22 October 2026, according to Hürriyet Daily News, which put annual consumer inflation at 29.73% for September. Those are enormous numbers by euro standards, and they’re a large part of why the lira has been sliding for years.

We have not fixed a lira rate here, because any figure we printed would be out of date within days. Policy rates and inflation prints change too, so read the above as of October 2026. The live level is on the EUR to TRY page, with rates refreshed hourly.

What does a slow, steady slide mean for you? Two things, and they pull in opposite directions.

First, the euro keeps buying more lira on paper, which feels good on the day you send. Second, the lira your relative receives loses purchasing power at home faster than almost anything else in the corridor. If the money sits for weeks in a lira account while prices climb near 30% a year, the real value erodes. The practical answer isn’t clever: send what is needed, when it’s needed, and talk to the recipient about how quickly to spend or convert. Whether they can hold a foreign-currency account is a question for their bank, and the rules vary.

What to check on the receiving side

The exact account format. Moroccan and Turkish banks use IBANs, but a typo means a rejected or delayed payment, and some of the lost time comes with return fees.
Whether the recipient is paid in local currency or the payout is converted by their own bank afterward. A second conversion on arrival is a second margin, usually invisible.
Who pays the fees. “Shared” or “OUR” instructions on a SWIFT payment decide whether the beneficiary bank deducts a charge from what arrives.
Pickup versus deposit. Cash pickup is convenient for relatives without accounts, though costs can differ.

Official channels, and why they matter

Both countries regulate who may move money in and out. Use a bank, or a payment or money transfer firm licensed in your European country of residence and authorised to pay out in Morocco or Turkey. The check is simple: look the firm up on your national financial regulator’s public register. If someone offers to “carry” cash or settle through a friend’s account for a better rate, you’ve left the protected zone. If it goes wrong, nobody is obliged to help.

Also be sceptical of urgency. A scammer posing as a relative needing money today wants you to skip every check above.

A short routine for each transfer

Open the converter and note the mid-market rate for your pair. Get two or three quotes expressed as the amount received. Work out the gap. Confirm the delivery method and the arrival estimate in writing in the app. Send a small test if it’s your first time to that account.

That’s it. No secret. Providers have good products: some of the tight-margin options really are far cheaper than a high street bank, and the speed of a local payout is real. The point is to buy the thing on the label rather than the thing in the marketing.

Prices, limits and rules change, so confirm anything specific with your provider, and talk to a qualified adviser about tax or legal questions. This guide is general information only.

Sources

Checked: November 2026