Especially on e-commerce sites, and with consideration
to your specific public, you may want to consider
whether offering a choice of certain less common
currency units represent a useful service or if
instead it just makes the list unnecessarily long
and more difficult to use for the user, and the
entire system more expensive and difficult to
maintain for you.
If your currency data
provider offers a long list of currencies (possibly
including currencies which ceased to be legal tender,
currencies which are updated only once per week
and non-currency commodities such as gold and silver)
you may want to manually remove less-used ones and
locking the list of currencies in the All Currencies
tab. This will ensure that no "surprise" units are
automatically added, and that you will be notified
if some currencies which you want to be up-to-date
are not updated by a scheduled refresh.
In our experience with e-commerce and currency
information sites, we noticed how a lot of interesting
statistics can get lost when the data is simply
added to a list and sorted by frequency. From a
local perspective, transactions tend to consist
of one local currency plus one or two more popular
currencies. For example, as can be expected, conversions
from the US dollar to the Canadian dollar and vice
versa are very popular in Canada. In a similar way,
the euro has established itself as a second
currency in the United Kingdom and in other European
countries which did not join the EMU.
To ease general-purpose implementations,
within the Currency System family of software
and services currencies have been grouped into
three levels of "Currency Rank", reflecting popularity.
Currency Rank 3 (High Popularity)Globally, the US dollar and the EU euro are used
as a source or destination currency in more than
50% of conversion requests.
The following currencies (listed in alphabetical
order) stand out both because of interest peaks
in specific regions and because, combined, they
are used in more than 90% of total requests from
more than 200 countries:
- AUD - Australian dollar
- CAD - Canadian dollar
- CHF - Swiss franc
- CNY - Chinese yuan renminbi
- EUR - EU euro
- GBP - British pound
- JPY - Japanese yen
- USD - US dollar
Currency Rank 2 (Medium Popularity)It takes
a bit more than 30 additional
currencies to cover approximately 98% of
total worldwide requests:
- ARS - Argentine peso
- BGN - Bulgarian lev
- BRL - Brazilian real
- CLP - Chilean peso
- CZK - Czech koruna
- DKK - Danish krone
- EGP - Egyptian pound
- FJD - Fiji dollar
- HKD - Hong Kong SAR dollar
- HUF - Hungarian forint
- IDR - Indonesian rupiah
- ILS - Israeli new shekel
- INR - Indian rupee
- ISK - Icelandic krona
- JMD - Jamaican dollar
- KRW - South Korean won
- MXN - Mexican peso
- MYR - Malaysian ringgit
- NOK - Norwegian krone
- NZD - New Zealand dollar
- PHP - Philippine piso
- PKR - Pakistani rupee
- PLN - Polish zloty
- RON - Romanian leu
- RUB - Russian ruble
- SAR - Saudi riyal
- SEK - Swedish krona
- SGD - Singapore dollar
- THB - Thai baht
- TRY - Turkish lira
- TWD - Taiwan new dollar
- XDR - IMF special drawing right
- ZAR - South African rand
Currency Rank 1 (All Other Currencies)We specifically recommend to be extremely
cautious when considering to implement a list of
"all currencies of the world". This is as
difficult and expensive to achieve in practice
as it may be tempting in theory.
Reasons for this include:
- The more uncommon a currency is on the
foreign exchange market, the less likely it
is to be supported by some FX feeds.
This is related to the trading volume of the
given currency and/or to the availability of
official reference data (e.g. provided by a
national central bank). If there is no such
data, it is more difficult to provide a
meaningful exchange rate, i.e. one that has
any practical use.
- In countries for which meaningful
exchange rates are difficult to find, e.g.
where there are major discrepancies between
official rates, street rates, bank rates,
etc., the public generally already uses
another major currency (e.g. the US dollar,
or the euro) when doing international
transactions, as in e-commerce.
- The fact that any of the above issues
apply usually reflects the stability of both
the country and the currency, meaning that
these currencies and codes are much more
likely to require maintenance (changes
in currency code or country name,
redenomination, extreme fluctuations, etc.)
than major currencies.
If you are interested in supporting a high
number of these currencies, then the
Currency Server
software, which supports
all
currencies of the world, is probably a very
good choice. Then you need to choose the
individual feed(s) that will provide exchange
rate data for the desired currencies.
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