RabbitFX: simple, transparent and secure.

One of the downsides of having a reasonably ‘international’ life is having to manage foreign exchange risks and effect international currency transfers and payments reasonable regularly. If you only do this once every few years for a few thousand pounds/dollars/euros/etc., you may not notice or care that your bank generally makes this quite hard to do and charges you an arm and a leg for the pleasure (no commission is just dishonest marketing-speak.) If however, you need to make a few foreign currency payments or transfers each year; and/or you have more significant sums at stake, your bank is probably not the best place to do your FX business.

You could (and perhaps do, as I did) use one of the literally hundreds of FX brokers, and if you have the time, knowledge of spot rates and inclination to haggle and shop around, you will get a good price. For a transfer of £10,000 for example you could easily save on the order of £100 or more compared to your bank. However (aside from needing the time, skill and energy to haggle and shop around), in my experience that is the easy part. It is only once you have traded that the fun really starts. Faxes, printing pdfs, clunky websites… getting your money to the broker and then back out in the new currency to the destination account is all too often a long and painful experience. Not completely surprising given the traditional business culture found in financial services: the trade is done (and revenue is booked), the rest is just ‘back office’, paperwork…boring. But from a customer point of view, this is upside-down: the trade is the easy part, undifferentiated, relatively painless (notwithstanding the see-what-you-can-get-away-with pricing algorithms of most of the industry.) Your time (and mental health!) is valuable, being able to trade painlessly in just seconds is often times as valuable or more than a tight price. In any event, you shouldn’t have to choose between them, and now you no longer need to.

So when an ex-colleague of mine Nigel Verdon came to me with a new concept in FX payments and broking, one that was predicated on transparency, simplicity and automation, I listened. I liked what I heard and I became one of the first guinea pigs customers. I liked it so much, I bought (a stake in) the company. The company of course is FX Capital Group which I’ve written about previously, here and here. Nigel and his team have built an extremely robust and technologically modern FX payments platform that essentially acts as middleware between any end user and their bank accounts and the enormous and highly efficient wholesale, interbank currency markets. On top of this platform, they have built two applications: FX Capital – adapted for corporate customers, and RabbitFX for private clients. In the coming weeks, they will also release their API, with the clear objective of allowing anyone to embed FX and international payments into their website, workflow or application. Indeed, one of the first target markets for their platform technology is the hundreds of FX brokers who currently struggle with poor or non-existent technology. By allowing them to focus on what they do best (generally distribution – client acquisition and relationship management) and improve the level of service to their customers by outsourcing the technology to FXCG, everyone – client, broker, FXCG – is a winner. Think of it as FXaaS (FX as a Service.)

…[FX Capital Group provides] FX-as-a-Service.

The reason for today’s post however is to announce the new RabbitFX website, which I hope you will agree looks fantastic and even more importantly is easy to use and understand. It’s not perfect (still lots of improvements and features in the pipeline) but we think it is ‘good enough’: we are confident that the user experience is better than any other specialist FX broker in the market. And this starts right from the beginning: sign up for an account today and you’ll see what I mean. For UK customers, you should be able to get everything done online; customers based outside the UK (and some UK customers) can do 90% online and will need to send some identity documentation (in order for RabbitFX to fulfill its ‘know-your-customer’ regulatory requirements.) And once your account is open, I’m sure you’ll find like I did that making a FX payment has never been easier.

It really is “Currency Exchange made simple, transparent and secure.”

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