Foreign Exchange Rate Integrity®
FX Advisory and Brokerage
Five stages from "we don't know what we pay" to pricing you can verify
Most companies cannot answer a simple question about their foreign exchange: what is the margin, and who agreed to it? The rate arrives inside the transaction, no one signed off on it, and it never appears as a line item anyone reviews.
We answer that question, renegotiate the spread, and then make sure it holds.
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Evaluate
Find out what you are actually paying.
We start with your trade history. Foreign exchange purchased through a bank's automated internet system carries a time stamp, and that time stamp is the whole key: with the rate and the moment the trade was dealt, we can price it against the interbank market as it stood at that second.
That tells us the margin on every trade — whether your average cost has been half a percent or three percent. From there we assess whether those terms are reasonable for your volume and the size of your overall banking relationship.
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Teach
Build the knowledge on your side of the table.
Analysis you cannot repeat is worth very little. We coach your management team on how FX pricing actually works: spot purchases over the internet, large transactions, and forward contracts each have different economics and different room to negotiate.
Part of this is technical. Part of it is structural — deciding who in your organization owns FX pricing, what they are accountable for, and who they escalate to. Companies overpay for years because that ownership was never assigned to anyone.
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Broker
Negotiate terms in writing, not goodwill.
We use our bank relationships to broker definitive foreign exchange terms — a written, pre-agreed spread over the interbank mid-market rate, covering the channels, locations and subsidiaries you name — so your cost is a known and defensible spread rather than whatever the desk applies that morning.
Knowing how bank back offices run and how prices actually get set lets us do this diplomatically. The objective is a better arrangement with the bank you already have — not a fight, and not a migration. On the rare occasion a bank will not move, we introduce one that will and manage the transfer of your FX and related services.
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Establish
Write the process down so the savings survive staff turnover.
Once the evaluation, coaching and negotiation are done, we codify the procedures: who manages the FX process day to day, who holds oversight, and how performance gets reviewed. The point is continuous improvement in a function that previously ran on indifference.
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Verify
Confirm the bank is honoring what it agreed to.
An agreed markup is only worth what the monitoring behind it is worth. We review your pricing on an ongoing basis to confirm compliance with the arrangement, and we investigate the variances — some are legitimate, driven by volatility, exotic currency pairs, or an operational issue at the bank, and some are drift. Variances are documented and, where significant, can warrant a refund — one oil company obtained one within weeks of its first review.
That assessment drives the recommendation: where the relationship is working, where it needs attention, and where it needs a conversation. This is the follow-up program that keeps your Foreign Exchange Rate Integrity® in place instead of eroding quietly over the next two years.
Start with the evaluation
The first stage is the one that costs you nothing. Send us your recent trade history, including the trade date, time stamp, time zone, amounts and currencies sold and bought, and currency pair. We will price every trade against the market at the moment it was dealt, then show you the margin in dollars and in basis points. No obligation to continue.
Please do NOT send confidential account or payee information.
Request your complimentary FX evaluation →