CurrencyFair, a unique P2P money exchange platform
CurrencyFair is a neobank and a unique currency exchange facilitator combined:
CurrencyFair is Ireland’s neobank that also allows individuals to sell and buy currency as P2P transfers. Its customers can either exchange their currency i mmediately using the best rate currently available, or offer his or her funds at a rate of choice and wait for another customer to match the offer. This way it eliminates the middleman and the calculations are that a customer can save up to 8 times in comparison with bank transactions. The neobank essentially caters to the requirements of expatriates worldwide.
CurrencyFair offers several options. Unlike other traditional service providers, it does not hide its fees in the exchange rate or charge a different rate depending on the amount one transfers. One can exchange funds in simple, 3 steps - deposit, exchange and transfer.
3-STEP PROCESS
In the first step, one needs to transfer funds that are required to be exchanged from the bank account into CurrencyFair’s client bank account. (CurrencyFair operates local accounts in most currencies and this is simple to do using internet or phone banking.) The customer can also use debit cards for the fund transfer. Once the funds are in CurrencyFair’s account, it is credited into the concerned customer’s CurrencyFair account and a message is sent informing the customer about the second step to be initiated.
Then comes the exchange part. This can be done in 2 ways - auto-transaction or via the exchange. One can use ‘Create an Auto-Transaction’ to exchange any amount straightaway at the best rates that are currently available. The other method is to Exchange, where the customer can choose his or her rate and wait for other customers to accept the offer.
As soon as the funds are exchanged, the final step comes in - transfer. The customer then have to enter the beneficiary account details and CurrencyFair does the transfer. One can transfer to his own account or that of a third party, such as family or friends, a supplier or a merchant.
FULLY REGULATED
The Central Bank of Ireland has fully authorized CurrencyFair to do the business in terms of Regulation 18 of the European Union (Payment Services) Regulations 2018. In fact, Currency Fair is an authorized representative of CurrencyFair Australia, which is a regulated entity in that country by ASIC.
Countries that are supported by CurrencyFair Money Transfer service include Australia, the UK, Canada, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, South Korea, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore and South Africa.
When it comes to the charges that CurrencyFair levies, it is a small fee for each transfer, which varies depending on the currency pairs involved and the transfer amount. These fees are lower compared to the charges levied by traditional banks and money transfer agencies. It can be in the range of 0.1% to 0.6%, plus a fixed € 3 transfer fee. Both individual and business users can internationally send up to 10,000,000 in the relevant currency.
The whole process of sending and transferring money may take between 1 and 5 business days.
CurrencyFair has deployed highly reliable and established security measures to protect personal and financial information of a customer, including encryption and identity verification. It also offers twofactor authentication as an additional layer of security for user accounts and users will have to enable this functionality.
A NEOBANK TOO
Apart from being a unique money exchange platform, CurrencyFair is also neobank offering personal accounts, business accounts, including a debit card, with all transactions being managed from an iPhone or Android app. A customer can open mobile bank accounts in various countries, including Australia, Austria,
Belgium, U.A.E, France, Germany, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. The banking facility comes in handy, especially for expats, who need to remit money, in addition to having a bank account. In about 10 years, it has enrolled more than 150,000 customers and ate present there are 20 currencies that can be exchanged on its platform.
CurrencyFair was founded by Brett Meyers, Jonathan Potter, Sean Barrett and David Christian. It became the first platform in the world to break the $1 billion (€916 million) barrier in money-matching transfers in 2014 and in April 2017 it revamped their platform to enable SMEs to use the service.
In a unique manner, CurrencyFair is using cloud for hosting its core platforms and migrating, running and optimising data and applications in the cloud. It is using AWS Cloud after weighing in several factors and benefits. As part of the full migration, it completed the complex task of hosting Oracle back-end, including mail servers, Business Intelligence systems and shared drives on the cloud and executed the migration out of the existing data centre in under 3 months with little or no downtime. The platform is now 100% in the cloud, enabling CurrencyFair to provide international transfers in 18 global currencies and serving over 100,000 customers.