May 28, 2007
This site has been eerily quiet since November when I took a working sabbatical. It wasn’t the kind of trip that gave me much time to post here while I focused on other priorities but I am back in the San Francisco bay area and looking forward to posting again. It’s nice to be back!
I’m starting down the road of processing foreign currencies; specifically Canadian dollars and British pounds. Beyond opening a company, acquiring a local bank and merchant account, can anyone recommend another way of accepting foreign currencies? I’d rather have a single gateway provider and I’m not interested in using Paypal.
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Rob Munn said:
on May 28, 2007 at 7:23 pm
I use PayPal for billing purposes with foreign clients, but I do small numbers of transactions so I can process them manually. The only other way I have been able to accept foreign currencies is through direct bank transfer, and that system only works for trusted clients.
I was going to suggest you check Verisign, but apparently their Payment Services has been acquired by PayPal.
brian said:
on May 29, 2007 at 7:47 am
@Rob, thanks for the ideas… I’d prefer to avoid Paypal but realize it may be impossible for foreign transactions. As far as I can tell, their payment gateway API doesn’t support foreign currencies yet which would mean processing by hand and I have over 100 payments per day (although right now, 0 in Canadian dollars).
How do companies like Amazon do this? Or Paypal themselves?
Rob Munn said:
on May 29, 2007 at 5:41 pm
Companies that do business in more than one country typically have local currency bank accounts. That’s certainly true for the bigger companies I have worked for. Even for a couple of the small ones had accounts in more than one country. Often such companies have local offices with their own staff. They may have their own financial systems, depending on how the company is set up, the reporting requirements of the local country, etc.
brian said:
on June 5, 2007 at 4:57 pm
For Canada at least, it appears that it is a requirement to have a bank account which requires a local address. Companies appear to offer PO Box type services to support these. I have not checked with my existing merchant account companies to see if they can provide a Canadian funds account yet but will do soon.