Antwerp in The Netherlands. 84% of the world's rough diamonds and over $16billion worth of polished diamonds pass through Antwerp's exchanges annually. As you might expect, many of these rare a precious stones are, understandably, priced/valued in EUR, but, a large proportion are also valued in the global reserve currency of US dollars. This means businesses and brokers operating outside the sphere of this local or reserve currency, for instance those in the UK, require curre

There are all manner of elaborate ways for big businesses to inject stunningly convoluted mechanisms for multiple payments associated with payroll, top-ups and other batch or bulk transmissions. Annoyingly for small businesses it always tends to cost more than it should and take up a fair bit of time, particularly when the recipient is abroad. So, in this simple and quick post we will give two examples of clients of ours who make use of us to send multiple payments. We'll ex

A huge number of people use their bank to send an international payment. Whilst this is totally unsurprising, we'd like to give you some reasons why using a company like Prime Cap might be better, cheaper and easier. The rate you'll get: For a couple of reasons, your bank isn't minded to improve a rate of exchange when pushed to do so. A lot of time and money was no doubt spent on your bank improving and refining their online banking offering to their customers. Sending an in

Whilst the personal payments industry as a whole owes a great deal to the likes of Transferwise et al for engaging it's target audience in a dialogue about 'out-of-touch' charging, is their approach disingenuous? If you have ever tried to do an online payment through your bank then you will know that the cost of sending the payment and the rate of exchange offered and applied to the exchange itself are two different things. Your bank will show you what rate of exchange they a

For an increasing number of private clients living in the UK, receiving money from abroad is not such an alien concept. Sure, they may never send money abroad and anything incoming might be a one off or their only engagement with foreign currencies between bank accounts, but, there are some simple ways to maximise the sterling amount you get into your bank account, and there are some very easy instructions you can provide to the person or company sending money to you. You wan

Certain countries and territories have yet to develop stable and consistent internal banking processes. This can make it difficult to confidently send and receive money from these countries. In particular clients face problems 'getting their money out' of countries that do not have as sophisticated a payment services frame work as somewhere like the UK...although, having said that we recently encountered a customer struggling to get their money out of rural France (but that

Some clients see the differences between these two methods of broker engagement as being like analogue vs. digital, old vs. new, telephone vs. carrier pigeon...and yet, given the way some of the brokers in London operate you'd get a faster response if you did use 'Speckled Jim' to issue your instructions. What do we mean, specifically and in the context of this post, by these two terms and why do we have them listed separately on PrimeCap.com? DEALING BY PHONE: If we're teach

Short of some elaborate fraud (and there are some I shall describe that are just plain crafty), it is rather difficult to simply ‘lose’ your money when dealing with a foreign currency company. Having said that, one shouldn’t be nonchalant. Any FX firm you inquire with will do their due diligence on you. Why not do you due diligence on them? We appreciate that you may consider life too short and you may very well have had a concrete recommendation to use our firm, bully for y