Currency Fair courts local Irish firms with free forex transfers

Irish-based, P2P forex platform, Currency Fair, plans to allow Irish businesses on its platform to transfer money abroad for free, to encourage more to join the platform. This follows news last week the Xendpay launched its “pay-what-you-want money transfer service”. A recent study commissioned by peer, TranferWise revealed the excessive profits made by UK banks from SME forex transactions is likely to encourage more SMEs and other customers to use P2P start-ups to execute their forex transactions. 

International money-transfer business Currency Fair is working on a plan to allow Irish businesses on its platform to transfer money abroad for free.

The idea is to encourage more businesses to join the platform.

"We get a lot of businesses using us and we've never actually really targeted businesses in our marketing and so on. It's always been that businesses come to us, really, through word of mouth," Currency Fair chief executive and co-founder Brett Meyers said.

"We actually thought, 'This year, let's put a bit more effort into letting businesses know about us.'

"We haven't worked out the exact details yet, but it's likely to involve giving some free priority transfers for Irish businesses - those are our same-day transfers that we find businesses want to use more than just the standard, which takes a day generally.

"The plan would be that it's enough (free foreign transfers) to cover what the average business might be looking for in the year.

"Irish businesses should be helping each other export."