Why we started

Business FX Guide began in 2019 when our founders, two operations leads at a mid-sized importer, spent three weeks reconciling a single EUR payment. The bank statement showed one rate, the contract another, and the broker a third. No one could explain the $4,200 gap. That experience—and the dozen similar ones that followed—made one thing clear: most businesses learn currency costs only after they've paid them.

We built this site to change that order. We are not a broker, a bank, or a payments processor. We don't sell conversions. We collect what companies actually pay—line by line—and publish it so finance teams can see the real cost of moving money across borders before they sign.

What we do

We maintain a database of FX fees and spreads from 40+ providers, updated quarterly. Each entry traces to a source: a published rate card, a customer contract shared with permission, or a recorded quote from a sales call. When a provider won't disclose pricing, we say so rather than estimate.

Our guides walk through the mechanics that drive cost—settlement timing, correspondent banking chains, hedging instruments—using anonymized transaction data from our reader surveys. We publish the raw survey responses alongside our analysis, including the cases where our initial assumptions were wrong.

How we work

Independence is the only way this is useful. We take no referral fees, no affiliate commissions, and no sponsored placements. Providers cannot pay to be listed, ranked, or reviewed. Our revenue comes from a paid newsletter and from workshops we run for finance teams; those clients get no editorial influence.

Every article carries the name of the person who wrote it and the date it was last checked. If we cite a number, you can click through to where it came from. If we don't know something—and often we don't—we write that instead of filling the gap with a plausible guess.

Who we are

Our team of six has spent a combined 40 years on the corporate side of FX: treasury, accounts payable, and procurement. We've negotiated bank spreads, closed forward contracts, and explained variance to auditors. We started this because we were the people searching for this information and finding only sales pages.

We are based in Chicago. Our editorial meetings are video calls with a shared spreadsheet of open questions. When a reader sends a correction—and they do—we log it, verify it, and update the article with a note at the bottom.

What we won't do

We won't recommend a specific provider. We won't pretend a complex problem has a simple answer. And we won't publish a rate without telling you when it was quoted and under what conditions.

If that sounds like the kind of FX information you've been looking for, the newsletter is free. If you have a contract or a quote that surprised you, send it over. That's how the database gets better.