Our News
Faster Payments, and upcoming changes over the next few weeks
- 12 Dec 2011
We have some great news for those customers that make deposits in Sterling – Bank of America is now accepting Faster Payments! This means you will no longer have to wait 2-3 days for your GBP funds to become available – they will now clear within a couple of hours, or first thing the next morning if you make the deposit late in the day! The instructions are the same as our old BACS instructions, so you won’t need to make any changes to where you currently send the funds.
In addition, we are implementing several improvements and changes to the website over the coming weeks. This may mean that the site is unavailable at times over the weekend. We will endeavour to keep any disruption to a minimum.
Here are details of some of the changes:
1) New look homepage and supporting website
This is going to happen very soon, and will involve a completely new look to the CurrencyFair website. In fact, only the logo will look familiar, but don’t be alarmed! We hope you’ll find it cleaner, clearer, and more interesting than our current website, with answers to most if not all of the questions you might think to ask about our service.
There will still be a link to log in at the top right of the homepage, and your login details won’t change. What will be a bit different though, is that after logging in, a new tab will open, and you will do everything from this new window; viewing your account details, deposit notifications, exchanging, and transfers. It should all be fairly clear, but please get in touch if you have any concerns.
2) Introduction of commission
Starting from Monday 19th December, we will be applying a small built-in commission to the marketplace of 0.15% of the amount exchanged. We hope you’ll agree that 0.15% is more than reasonable for providing the peer-to-peer marketplace service; it's about 1/20th of that typically charged by banks, and 1/10th that of typical brokers.
Please note that this commission is built-in to the rates on the marketplace, not applied afterwards. So the rates you see on the marketplace are still the final rates that you receive. Likewise, if you choose to offer up your funds at a certain rate, and they are matched, you still receive the rate you asked for. Nothing will be deducted after you are matched except our transfer fee, and this remains unchanged.
3) QuickTrade
We will shortly be introducing a QuickTrade feature which will streamline the process of exchanging any amount immediately. QuickTrade allows you to simply specify the currency you have, the currency you want to buy, and the amount, and will quote you a rate based on what is available on the marketplace at that instant. You can then simply confirm and your full amount will be converted at that rate.
4) Quicker, clearer screens for adding accounts, deposit notifications and transfers
During January we’ll be upgrading all of our internal screens to make them clearer and easier to use.
5) Weekend Trading
At the moment we close the markets at weekends, in line with the global FX markets. Soon we plan to leave the markets open over the weekend, so that you can exchange whenever you like. We’ll still only be able to make transfers on business days when the banks are open, but this should make the service far more convenient for you.
6) Standing orders
We’ll be giving you the ability to set up a standing order, whereby you can specify that when you deposit funds, you want them instantly converted at the best available rate and sent to a nominated beneficiary bank account. Set this up once, and you’ll then be able to convert and transfer simply by sending us funds; you won’t even need to log in to CurrencyFair!
7) New currencies
During 2012 we plan on adding several more currencies to the marketplace, opening up the CurrencyFair peer-to-peer marketplace to new groups of people worldwide.
