Foreign exchange is a key component of the international trade environment. With hundreds of currencies in use throughout the world, it is necessary to be able to convert these currencies into your local currency or perhaps one of the major ‘hard’ currencies such as the US dollar, the British pound, the euro, the Swiss franc or the Japanese yen, and/or visa versa. To be able to do this, you will need to make use of a currency converter. In this section, we provide links to some of the better currency converters available.

General currency converters

• Oanda FXConverter: Oanda one of the more popular online currency converters and incorporates most of the better-known currencies in use throughout the world (including the SA rand). We believe that this is the currency converter of choice. It incorporates most of the world’s currencies and you can personalise this facility and even check a currency on a given date – nice to see what the history of a currency was – a nice reference facility. In additional, Oanda offers currency cross-rates for up to 20 currencies; historical currency exchange rates for periods of your choosing; the ability to print travellers’ currency cheat sheets; as well as a bunch of other business tools.
• My Currency Transfer: This site features a currency converter with up-to-date exchange rates plus a table of the main currency values.
• XE.com Universal Currency Converter: The XE.com Universal Currency Converter (UCC) is is another of the ‘biggies’ and is a popular currency converter used throughout the world. If you need to convert one of the more obscure currencies, the XE has a ‘full’ version listing every known currency in the world (more than 180 currencies in 250 geographical locations).
• X-rates: X-rates is another currency converter tool. It offers currency tables where one currency can be listed against a host of other currencies and you can also access historical currency data. It is not nearly as comprehensive as the above two converters, however.
• Convert-it: Still another currency converter. This service offers a basic converter, converting one currency to another, as well converting one currency amount into all other currencies and creating a currency cross-table. Like X-rates, however, this converter is simply not as good as XE or Oanda.