Context
The setup before I touched it.
Remittance is a knife-fight on price. A migrant worker sending AED 1,000 home to the Philippines, India, or Pakistan will switch providers for a 5 AED difference - and they check. Competitors update fees and FX margins constantly, sometimes daily. Without a fresh competitive picture, the pricing team is either too expensive (losing volume) or too cheap (burning margin) - and they only find out weeks later from the volume report.
How it came together
Step by step - expand any phase for the highlights.
- 6-8 competitors per major corridor
- UAE → IN, PH, PK, EG, and more
- Identified pricing levers (fee, FX, promo)
Problem → Approach → Result
The short version, for the broad audience.
Problem
- 01Manually checking 6-8 competitor calculators across every major corridor every morning was slow, boring, and error-prone - so it didn't happen.
- 02There was no single source of truth for 'who is cheapest UAE → India today' - the answer lived in screenshots, Slack messages, and someone's memory.
- 03Competitor pricing moves were caught days late, which translated directly into lost transaction volume on hot corridors.
- 04Pricing meetings ran on anecdotes ('I think Lulu dropped their fee last week') instead of data.
Approach
- 01Built a scheduled scraper that hits competitor pricing calculators across UAE → all major corridors automatically, every morning.
- 02Normalized the messy reality of remittance pricing - upfront fees, FX margin, promotional rates, bands by amount - into a single comparable 'total cost' metric.
- 03Surfaced movement over time so the team sees not just where rates *are*, but where they're *trending* - early warning for competitor strategy shifts.
- 04Made it dead-simple: one internal page, no training needed, no dashboards-of-dashboards. Just 'who's cheapest, where, and what changed'.
Result
- 01Pricing team starts every day with a fresh competitive snapshot instead of guessing.
- 02Reaction time to competitor moves dropped from days to hours - measurable impact on corridor-level volume.
- 03Pricing decisions are now backed by actual numbers, which makes them faster *and* easier to defend up the chain.
- 04Replaced an entire recurring manual workflow that nobody was sad to lose.
Role
Designed and shipped solo as an internal tool - from scrape to dashboard.
Status
Live - internal
React
Tap if this resonated.
What do you think?
Leave a comment or ping me — any feedback, thoughts, or collab ideas, I'll really appreciate it. Building alone is no fun.