Online FX
Online FX is a website that deals in most aspects of FX. You can arrange International Money Transfers that will arrive in two days to any bank anywhere in Europe or the US; travel cash in notes or traveller's cheques to be delivered to your home or place of work the next day (when ordered before 12:30) – with optional buy back of unused currency at the same rate; and 24 hour currency trading. As such you will no doubt agree they have quite a lot going on!
The website has a more basic look and feel than many other websites of this nature do, but that is no bad thing. As you will see it has been going since 1999, so it has a decade of experience under its belt already.
Take me to the site! How do I get there?
It’s not difficult to reach the home page at Online FX, and from there it is just as easy to get to the various parts of the site as and when you need them.
What does the site offer?
An awful lot, as you will see. As you would expect a site as thorough as this has a built-in currency converter so that you can see at a glance what kind of exchange rates are available. The converter is launched by clicking on ‘currency converter’, or ‘multi-currency converter’ on the top of the vertical menu on the left hand side of the page.
They also have a currency guide accessible from the left side of the home page, and a destination guide which you can use if you are trying to figure out where to head to on holiday!
You might also be surprised to see flights, hotels and a myriad of other services appearing as links on the main home page – check them out to see whether the site could be of any further assistance to you.
What is their currency converter like?
The calculator launches in a small sub-window, which is useful since you don’t lose the main site or page you are on. The standard currency converter converts GBP into your choice of foreign currency. The result is at the site's own retail rate.
For the purposes of this review, however, we'll focus on the multi currency converter (which can still convert from GBP) as it allows full flexibility in both source and destination currencies. The multi currency converter uses spot rates and is “only for reference” as the actual retail rates used for buying and selling with Online FX are different.
The first box that you encounter in the multi-currency converter is the drop-down box called “select from”. Within that drop-down box there is a series of 44 potential source currencies for you to choose from. They are listed alphabetically by country names (apart from the British pound, which understandably appears first), followed by the currency name - for example US dollars. The exception to the country/ currency layout is the Euro, which appears by itself.
None of the currencies' 3 letter codes (e.g. USD) appear here. If you wanted to convert 1500 USD to HKD this box is where you would choose US Dollars. The box below this is entitled “Enter Amount”. This is where you input how much of your source currency you'd like to convert. It is always a good idea to enter these amounts without currency symbols - such as $ - and without numerical punctuation, such as commas to indicate thousands. In our example it would be better to enter 1500 rather than $1500 or 1,500.
The box below this is called “select to”. This slightly confusing name means that this is the box where you should select the currency you wish to convert to. It contains the same 44 options as the select from box above, laid out in the same way. In our example you would select Hong Kong dollars in this box as we wish to convert into HKD.
Finally click on the button at the bottom called “convert”. In an instant the lowest box titled “conversion result” is filled with the answer – that is how many Hong Kong dollars your 1500 USD will buy you on the spot market.
The currency converter itself is fast and simple. The website on which it is based offers a vast array of practical currency buying and selling options as well as spot market trading.
Supposing I need some help and advice – can they help me with that?
If you need any help finding what you want there is a link to the site map at the bottom of the page. You can find this on any page you are on. Furthermore you can contact them – look for the ‘contact us’ link at the bottom of the page and click on that. You will see that it takes you through to a page full of details about how to get in touch with them in various ways.
It gives you an address, telephone and even a fax number if you need it. But there is also a list of email addresses that might prove useful if you require a particular type of information.
In conclusion
You may not have heard of Online FX previously, but you will soon realise that they have a good pedigree and a long history in this arena. They are based in London, and while the website isn’t the most high tech looking one, the information it contains is excellent.
It also has a great currency converter – two actually! – so it provides just the right kind of facilities when you need to use them. As such it is useful and a good site to have bookmarked on your computer.
Rating (out of five stars)
So it’s time to give a rating – and after a lot of thought we’re giving this site four out of five stars. The high rating is given mostly on the strength of the currency converters, since the two different types put it ahead of most of its competitors.
- 4 Stars
Link: http://www.onlinefx.co.uk/currencyconverter