Sean’s Blog

Today we officially launched our services in New Zealand. Alison Lambden, our NZ based representative is busy whipping the press into a frenzy and spreading the word on CurrencyFair.

New Zealanders by nature are great travellers, often doing stints in the UK, Australia and Ireland, and with NZ being such a great place to live it’s a popular spot for many Brits retiring or students moving to study.

Foreign exchange requirements in New Zealand are large and growing. Specifically migration to New Zealand gives rise to around 2 billion of FX transactions annually, not to mention another 2 billion on the back of the large number of international students.

This is due in no small part to the New Zealand government actively developing immigration through strategic polices like the Retirement Visa Policy and the Silver Fern Policies, designed at attracting high income retirees and skilled workers respectively.

Big changes have also been made in the area of business migration. Especially interesting for CurrencyFair the Business Migration Scheme now allows businesses to use foreign exchange companies (like CurrencyFair!) rather than just banks to make their business investments. Other changes to the rules around the number of days an investor has to spend in the country and “acceptable investments” have been relaxed making it much easier to qualify, so far attributing around NZD 560 Million.

So all in all loads going on in NZ and a perfect place for the CurrencyFair marketplace to create huge savings when sending money home, buying a property abroad, paying international student fees or funding new business investment.