Foreign exchange solutions and cross-border payments company Currencycloud has announced the launch of Weekend FX, providing clients with the ability to offer competitive FX rates 24/7, even after the markets close on a Friday evening.

Gone are the days of businesses operating 9-5, Monday to Friday. With an increasingly global business culture, companies and retailers often work outside of traditional operating hours and days of the week. But arranging cross-border payments after the markets have closed on a Friday exposes businesses to increased costs and associated risks while they wait for trading desks and banks to open again on Monday morning.

Traditionally, to overcome this, businesses would have one of two options for supporting customers through the weekend. Either businesses lose out to competitors, unable to offer this at all because the risk of FX fluctuation was too much for them to bear; or they built their own out-of-hours trading solution, involving a lot of development work and associated costs, as well as assuming enormous risk and, as a result, likely offering unappealing FX rates to their customers.

Currencycloud, expanding its partnership with Visa, has now extracted away all the risk, complexity, and cost to support businesses with cross-border payments outside of the normal Monday to Friday, with ‘Weekend FX’. This new solution means that Currencycloud clients can offer customers a competitive fixed FX rate after the markets close on a Friday evening, and this rate will be what clients and their customers settle at on Monday morning when the market opens again.

Steve Lemon, Co-founder & VP of Partners & Enterprise, commented:

“This is a massive step in overcoming business issues of operating 24/7. Together with Visa we now enable our clients to execute FX transactions over the weekend in exactly the same way, using a standardised API and workflow as they would during the week. Therefore, their customers can continue to operate their businesses and execute FX conversions in exactly the same way too.”

Following a pilot with clients including Swinto, Anna Money, and Tuvoli, subject to approval ‘Weekend FX’ is now available to the majority of Currencycloud clients.