Global By Local (GBL) processing
When sending money overseas with a bank, you’ll often be charged a hefty foreign exchange fee. But that’s not the only part that means you could end up losing money in the transfer.
Banks use something called the ‘interbank’ rate to trade money with each other. The rate fluctuates by the second, and it is the rate that you’ll see if you do a basic Google search like ‘1 AUD to USD’. But that’s not the rate that the banks give you, they usually add up to 5% on the daily exchange rate. So on a $10,000 transfer, you could be paying up to $500 on top of the initial fee. For example, say you wanted to transfer $10,000 from AUD to USD. With your standard bank you would receive $6,758 in return.2 With OFX, you’d receive $7,028. That’s a saving of $270!