Getting your forex fair and fast

If you’re a traveller, among the essentials are your passport, visa, tickets, and foreign exchange. Come to think of it, money changers and banks acquire customers through immigration consultants, foreign education consultants and the travel agency in an age that is seeing much of all these transactions taking place online. Among other names cropping up in online forex retail, BookMyForex, came to being as a marketplace in August 2014. CEO and Founder Sudarshan Motwani declares it the “the world’s first forex website that is completely live”, and therefore, ‘transparent’.

We’ve long been used to walking into a bank or a money lending kiosk at an airport where ‘buy’ and ‘sell’ rates don’t change. According to Motwani, rates are often set to surplus, allowing forex outlets to keep a good margin, when in fact, these rates being dynamic are a foundation for foreign exchange trade across the world. In India, where there’s an inconsistency in the application of regulatory guidelines, customers have often paid more than they need to.

“We’re creating a revolution where internet-savvy people are able to book their own foreign exchange. But we’re also converting and educating people who may not necessarily be online to buy anything… maybe they’re just logging on to Facebook. Through search engine optimisation, we appear on top in most searches on the web,” says Motwani.

The BookMyForex platform operates like the stock market, and seeks to bring about way more transparency by “updating rates every three seconds”.

This isn’t just a story of ‘technology to the rescue’. Making finance fairer has been the crux of multiple impossible-to- miss public campaigns, or ‘stunts’, by international fintech name TransferWise, for one.

To up the ante on its own campaign, BookMyForex recently launched its ZERO Margin initiative, to enable customers buy forex at exact inter-bank rates with zero exchange margin. 

“Banks and money changers load exchange margins ranging from 2 per cent to 5 per cent at their city offices to as high as 10-12 per cent at airport counters… now we’re able to offer zero commission on sale of foreign currency notes, travel cards and traveller’s cheques.

“And never before for a transaction as small as $100 has the Interbank rate been applied,” Motwani explains, underlining why disruption in forex space is no longer just about ‘going online’.

In a market crowded by mom-and-pop outlets, BookMyForex claims it is now the 5th or 6th largest forex distributor in the country.

It reportedly covers more than 5,000 banks and money exchange locations across 650 cities, thanks to its 38 channel partners along with partnerships with Axis Bank and Makemytrip.

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