There are a number of online platforms out there which allow individuals and companies to carry out currency conversions and to send currencies 'bought' to overseas or domestic foreign currency recipients (beneficiaries).
You might want to repay someone for money they sent you whilst travelling. Pay rent or cover a foreign currency mortgage. You might be invoiced by your foreign supplier in their local currency. You might live outside one country, sell something abroad and want to convert and move the proceeds to your foreign bank account. At the end of the day, one of the main obstacles to using a simple online solution is a belief that, without guidance, the process is hard and uncertain.
So, using images from our own online platform, here is a step by step guide to sending money to a foreign currency recipient, whether they're in the UK or abroad - remember, just because you're converting the currency you hold into a foreign currency doesn't mean the recipient is in a different country. All the aspects of your recipient's particulars feed in to how best to send money to them...and that is what we are here to help you through.
First off, once you're registered as a client (and we'll approach this from the perspective that you're not necessarily a client of Prime Cap) you'll first and foremost be invited to familiarise yourself with the look, feel and function of an online platform.
On completion of your registration with Prime Cap one of our team will arrange to take/talk you through using our system, either in person or verbally over the telephone.
Having 'logged in' you will be confronted with our simple dashboard.
Our system shows you any currency amounts you are holding with us.
It shows you any transactions you have booked, whether they be outstanding and waiting for you to pay for them, in processing, or recently completed.
We treat 'payments' and 'trades' as two distinct things. This is because, especially for people with dealings abroad or businesses with suppliers overseas, you might buy an amount of currency from us, but you might want that amount to be split up and sent to a number of different recipients.
By enabling you to create and chose who gets paid what, you can hold money with us and determine when they are paid even though you know what your GBP costs is or was at the time of the booking; discretion is totally yours.
The 'Dashboard' shows below it a number of different tabs.
We have 'NEW TRADE', 'HISTORY', 'BENEFICIARIES'...etc.
For your first transaction with us we want to talk you through the process. Therefore, our dealers will make some of the tabs on your dashboard visible to you only once you have called to speak with us. This is particularly the case with 'New Trade'.
Feed back has taught us that you're experience is improved if we are there to take you through the key points. We would rather speak to you before you try and interpret the system, rather than leave you wondering whether you have done things correctly.
Once visible on the left hand side, you can select 'New Trade', which takes you through to a sequence of steps, the first being titled 'Deal'.
On these screens you select the currency you want to 'buy' or 'sell'. If you have sterling (GBP) any foreign currency you want to 'send' is considered the currency you are buying. You are paying sterling and buying euros, for instance; and you can make this selection from the relevant drop down menu.
When you signed up with us we asked certain questions designed to enable us to create a profile for you and designed to enable us to fashion a profile of your uses for our services.
Asking you to select an outline of the reason for your transaction helps us to ensure you're using us in the way you said you would. This is important because, for one thing, it enables our traders to guide you in future as to the most effective, cheapest and quickest way of executing the transaction.
Additionally, if the reason deviates distinctly from the reasons you first gave us, we will attempt to confirm with you that this was intentional. Having this information helps us better serve you, but, it also serves as an initial barrier. Deviation from the norm prompts us to get in touch and talk with you in more detail. Should/could you be doing things differently, or to better effect?
Once the currencies, contract and reasons for transacting have been confirmed, you're propelled through to the second heading - Beneficiaries.
If this is your first trade with us you are unlikely to have any 'beneficiaries' available to chose in this section.
For future transactions though, you will see previously used details or those details you might have pre-loaded, or asked us to load, in anticipation of a transaction. Bear in mind that, for your first transaction, one of the Prime Cap team will be on the telephone with you whilst you progress through this sequence of prompts.
We will advise you to 'Skip' this section, because, as mentioned before, you can always create a payment and add a beneficiary later if you want - or you can just ask us to do it for you.
This 'New Trade' part of the process if focussed on securing the rate for you and firming up the amount of currency you need to pay for the foreign currency amount you are buying.
Before you 'buy' anything, all the details of the transaction are outlined on the 'Confirm' screen.
At this point you've not committed to anything. Also, at this point we show you an indication of our 'live' rate of exchange.
This will is the first visual presentation you will see of this rate. We can and will happily provide you with quotations as to this figure over the telephone or via email, even before you are formally registered.
The rate of exchange is a very important part of why you might chose to use us, so, you're rate will always be tailored to your conversations with us. It is hard for us to give you a figurative rate before we know a little bit about your transaction. Bear that in mind if you're 'shopping around'. A company who provides you with a rate before knowing what you need to do is being somewhat careless and probably doesn't intend to honour it, so, taking the time to understand what you need to do is in fact a good thing for a company to do.
To formalise this quotation, but not yet buy, you simply click 'Get Rate' in the bottom right of the screen.
This brings you on to a time dependent screen which provides you with a 10 second window to 'accept' the rate, or not; you can refresh an expired rate as many times as you like.
The reason we give you 10 seconds to accept the rate or not is because we only price our currency transactions from the 'live' market.
Innuendo abounds when it comes to talking about live rates of exchange. Essentially, these are the numbers you see flickering up or down, second by second, when you see financial screens or generic online financial or institutional platforms/charts.
Electronic matching of what an institution will offer for one currency and what another institution will 'accept' for it are the reasons why these figures fluctuate with such frequency. Computers and electronic matching means rates change quicker than one can keep up with in some cases. And so, we provide you with a window to consider what we are offering - it is a 10 second 'haven of reflection'.
Yes, it is fair to say that the rate we quote on this screen won't necessarily change too dramatically were you to visit another currency transfer provider and then pop back to us, but, we strongly recommend you compare our rates as closely (timing wise) as possible to someone else's because otherwise you're not comparing like for like.
We are often on the telephone with prospective clients who are looking at their existing platforms. We verbally provide them with a rate they can compare visually; it is a reasonable way of comparing and winning experienced customers over to our level of competition.
Understanding what moves the rate of exchange and which contracts and tools can improve your position, mitigate your risk to adverse movements and transact with confidence all forms part of the service we provide.
The decision to accept a rate will always be yours, but, how you convert your currency should bear scrutiny because it can significantly reduce your costs, whether you are an individual or a business.
Once you have 'accepted' the rate you are immediately provided visually with the banking details of our settlement account - forgive us for not publishing these here. Our system will also email you a copy of the transaction details and settlement instructions too.
Further more, your dashboard will now be updated to show the transaction and the actions you need to take to progress it. It is likely this will simply be paying the GBP amount to us.
We email you once your settlement amount has arrived with us.
We also email you once your payment has gone from us. All of the dates and particulars of it's arrival are catalogued on the system for you and you can refer to them simply by logging in and checking your 'Recent trades'.
Now, using our online system is, as we go to great lengths to impress, just one of the facets of the Prime Cap service.
The vast majority of our client, particularly in the private client space, never actually look at the online platform. They opt for either a bespoke operating arrangement or our 'Fully Managed' dealing structure.
Prime Cap represents the confluence of a number of different foreign exchange transacting methodologies. Before us there were the voice brokers, who simply provided quotes and took instructions over the phone. In the current market place millennial uses opt for the DIY method, happy to log in and execute for themselves. Prime Cap has taken the most valuable aspects of each approach and spliced them together in such a way as to ensure clients, whether businesses or private clients, get the most out of both. There is no longer one dimension to sending funds. Far from having to settle for the lesser of two evils, choosing either purely online or only verbal broking, you can now call on an experienced dealer to handle the online payment for you...and you get to witness and check in on that action if you chose.
If you're running for a flight, or even on one, you can message us to execute the payment you forgot to conduct before you left. Knowing you have funds sat on account with us, you can request we upload you beneficiary details and send to your recently confirmed recipient.
In the same way that time poor clients out source arbitrary activities, foreign exchange has a new silver service operator, and we are Prime Cap.
If you would like more detail on any of the topic discussed above, information on how to register as a client, or a taster as to the rates, terms and contracts unique to us, then please give us a call on +44 (0) 2031728193.