Old Chestnut: Cheap Currency Exchange

Probably the best way is to find someone who needs NZ$ and is willing to exchange £s for them at the interbank rate.

Try a currency broker. I use Currencies Direct who can usually give a spot price at a much better rate than a bank, but there are several others. If possible try to find a broker that a friend has used and can give a good report on. C.D. have been good for each of the transactions I have made through them.

Thanks for that Steve.

David

I have thought about this. There are of course small trust issues! I do know some london kiwis but the ones I trust most aren't sending money home!

rgds

David

You're welcome.

Hi david,

Take a look at the currency exchange services of

.You might be familiar with that site, as its THE currency reference on the web. However brings you to their currency exchange service. I use them a lot to pay my US suppliers, and I've found it to be by far the cheapest way of doing so. Their exchange rate is excellent, and they only charge a nominal amount to do the wire transfers. There is no subscription fee or minimum rate or any other ongoing fee.

Takes a little while to set up an account with them, but for the amount you are talking about it, it might be worth a look.

Regards

Ian

David J Ra>Sorry about this one - I've seen it many times but Google gives me

I've often thought of using these currency exchange services, but it seems that the cost of sending the money to them plus the cost of them remitting the foreign currency back to you would erode any saving you might make on the exchange rate.

Can you give a example of what these charges would typically amount to for you? What would be the minimum amount of money to exchange for it to be worthwhile?

Chris

A potted version of how the system works is as follows (this assumes you have already registered with them).

On their website you tell them the currency you are selling and the currency you are buying, in my case I'm selling GBP and buying USD. You inform then how you are going to pay them, and how you want them to pay the converted currency into the other account, more on that later. They then show the exchange rate and you confirm or cancel. Once confirmed, I do a UK->UK money transfer to their UK bank account. It takes the standard 3 days for it to arrive. When that happens they do the transfer from their UK account to the US account I informed them, I find that it generally takes a full week from me doing the UK transfer, to my business partner seeing the money in his account.

As The first part of the transfer is UK->UK, there are no transfer fees, its a standard UK transfer, I do it online via HSBC's bill payment. You can nominate them to do the transfer to the US account by either "wire" or "EFT". "EFT" does not involve any fees, but takes an extra day or two over "wire". Electronic Funds transfer is only available into US or canadian accounts. "wire" involves some fees, I can't remember what, but I do recall that it was substantially less than my bank was charging to wire UK pounds to a US based dollar account. I also recall that the fee was related to the value of the transfer. All my transfers are done via "EFT"

As you are selling NZ dollars, I'm not sure what the process would be. Perhaps they have an account set up in each supported country, They are canadian based but have a UK account as described above for accepting GBP payments. So if could be that the first part of the transfer would be from NZ->NZ. Also I do not know what wire fees they charge to deposit into a UK account.

As for conversion rate, I find that I get about 2.5c (US) less than the Xe.com headline rate on the

website, which is the spot inter-bank rate as far as I can tell. I find this is very favourable when compared to my local bank. Again when I dial in the fact that in my case there are no other charges at all, it works out by far the cheapest system for me.

Incidentally, it appears that the

site is little more than a wrapper around which is a major currency exchange company. So you may wish to use that site, although the rates and services are identical. Hope the above helps.

Regards

Ian

Thanks for the detailed information.

Actually it wasn't me, but another poster who was asking about NZD/GBP conversions. For my own use, I need to transfer about £1,000 a month to the Philippines and was wondering if XE might be worth using for that. HSBC currently charge me £10 for the transfer if I do it through their internet banking system. Because I also bank with HSBC overseas, the transfer usually arrives within a matter of a few hours. Their exchange rate seems to be 1.25% less than the interbank rate, which isn't too bad, so I may not save much by using XE.

Chris