From Lagos to Lilongwe to Khartoum, a small product and
engineering team is tracking what currencies are really worth, and giving the
answer away for free.
Ask five people in an African market what a dollar costs and
you may get five different answers, depending on whether you ask a bank, a
fintech app, a money changer or the central bank’s website. cheqfx.com, a
rate-tracking platform built by a team based in location, collects all of those
answers and puts them on one page.
The platform covers official, bank, fintech and
parallel-market rates for 42 African currencies, along with stocks,
crypto and
stablecoins. It is used by over hundred thousand people who follow
the markets, and by businesses that need to price, pay and plan in currencies
that move fast.
WHY PARALLEL-MARKET RATES MATTER
Official rates are the starting point, not the full picture.
In several of the continent’s most volatile markets, businesses and households
transact at rates that differ sharply from the official one. Companies that
budget on the official rate have, in many cases, discovered the difference only
when a payment came due.
cheqfx was built so that nobody has to find out that way.
The company estimates its users have collectively avoided $3.64 million in fees
and unfavourable conversions by seeing the true spread before they transact.
“People assume exchange-rate data is simple. It is not.
Sources disagree, markets move during the day, and a number without context can
mislead you. Our job is to make a complicated picture easy to read without
hiding the complexity.”
— Juliet Nwakwoke, Product Lead, cheqfx
“Most people see a rate on a screen. Behind it is a data
system we architected from the ground up: it collects rates from different
sources across different markets, checks them against each other, flags the
ones that do not add up, and publishes the result within few minutes, while
serving it fast enough to hold up on the most volatile days. A business
deciding where to convert a large payment cannot afford a stale or wrong
number, because the error lands directly on its margin. That is the standard we
engineered to, and it is why people and companies trust cheqfx with decisions
that move real money, and why they have avoided $3.64 million in fees and
losses.”
— Olayinka Solomon, Lead Engineer, cheqfx
WHAT THE PLATFORM DOES
Side-by-side rate comparison across official, bank, fintech
and parallel-market sources.
Currency and provider pages showing how each currency and
each provider’s rate has behaved.
A base-currency switcher to view rates per USD, GBP, EUR or
CAD.
Crypto pages with price charts, market statistics and
related news for every listed coin.
A currency converter and stock pages for investors following
African and global markets.
Embeds and an API so businesses can show live cheqfx rates
on their own products.
A GROWING AUDIENCE
The platform’s users include everyday rate-checkers,
diaspora members sending money home, traders, freelancers paid in foreign
currency, and finance teams at companies operating across borders. cheqfx is
free for individuals, and offers advertising, listing and data services for
companies that want to reach them.
“Our goal is for cheqfx to be the first place anyone in
Africa checks before they convert, send or pay,” said Olayinka. “One
sentence on vision or what comes next, for example new countries, a mobile app,
or an expanded API.”
About cheqfx.
cheqfx is a
global exchange-rate and market-data platform. It shows official, bank, fintech
and parallel-market rates side by side, with particular depth in volatile
African currency markets, alongside live crypto, stablecoin and stock data, so
individuals and businesses can see the real cost of moving money before they
act.
No comments:
Post a Comment