Blog / updates

Well, that time has come around again, and we’re currently celebrating our second birthday here at CurrencyFair! It seems an appropriate time to have a quick word about how we’ve done so far.

Since launching in May 2010 we have seen the equivalent of over €125 million exchanged and transferred via the site, saving our customers around €4 million in the process (compared to typical bank exchange rates and transfer fees)! These days we are seeing averages of around €600,000 exchanged daily, and we’re growing at over 10% every month. This is great news for our customers, since growth means more people exchanging on the site, which in turn means better and better exchange rates and even bigger savings.

Why are we growing so fast? We recently surveyed a few hundred of our...

The original idea for CurrencyFair was driven by my own personal frustrations, as an expat, with sending money internationally. The internet had come along and upset middle-men in pretty much every industry I could think of, depressing margins and generally resulting in better value for the consumer all round. Why then, did it cost me at least 3% of my money simply to exchange it into another currency and send it overseas, a process that cost the bank very little? We set up CurrencyFair largely because we knew that the peer-to-peer idea could work in this industry as it had in others. In fact, it seemed inevitable that the ridiculous margins being charged simply couldn’t last.

It’s now just over a year since we went live (Happy Birthday to us!), and we now have a better idea...

I can't say we were pushed into this, because having a blog on the site is something that we'd planned to do even prior to our launch in late April 2010. Still, a lot of our customers and friends have told us recently that, to paraphrase one of the more polite suggestions, "it's high time we got off of our asses and started to tell our story a little better" – thanks JM!

So, welcome to "Currency Affairs". We plan to keep you updated with progress at CurrencyFair, of course, but perhaps more importantly (as 3 of us are ex-bankers) we will give you some much-needed insider info into the murky world of foreign exchange transfers. We'll tell you what the real charges are when sending money abroad, the ways in which many of the fx providers in the market go about concealing these...