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Consumers have no access to these rates, especially not if it’s a retail point-of-sale transaction. Since wholesale or interbank rates are only accessible by banks or large corporates and not to retail consumers, it should not be a factor during the decision-making process. As a consumer, the benchmark rate should be something that can be considered your opportunity cost. Now that we know what wholesale and interbank rates are, let’s understand why we shouldn’t use them as a direct comparison. The wholesale or interbank market is a different market You may also have come across the term interbank exchange rates, which narrows the participants to banks. Wholesale exchange rates are the rates used by banks, governments, investment funds and large corporates to exchange currencies with one another. These rates are known as wholesale exchange rates. The company aggregates real-time data from worldwide sources, covering major trading venues. Likewise, the data for Google’s currency convertor is provided by Morningstar, a US based global provider of financial data.
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What exactly are the rates shown on XE or Google? The rates provided in XE’s free information services are mid-market rates from global currency markets. What are wholesale or interbank exchange rates? Source: Various money-changers in Singapore, XE, Google, as at Nov-2017 These money-changers were offering more CNY per SGD than the rates provided by XE and Google. The chart below shows some exchange rates for CNY/SGD from some money-changers that we gathered in Singapore on the same day we retrieved the rate from Google and XE (Sep-17). You may use the interbank rate as a quick and approximate reference, but not if you want to make precise calculations involving large sums.
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ATM withdrawal overseas (including any fees).credit cards (including fees and benefits).competing money-changers (locally and overseas).
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You should be comparing to other alternatives that are available to you, such as the exchange rates from:
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Whatever the case, the interbank rate is probably not an opportunity cost for you as a retail consumer, especially not if you're performing a retail point-of-sale transaction. The short answer: Don't use the interbank rate Wait a minute, how is it possible for money-changers to offer better rates than those shown on Google or XE? From Jul-17 to Nov-17, many money-changers in Singapore were offering to sell CNY at exchange rates that were better than the interbank or wholesale rates. Unfortunately, you may have just gotten a poor deal. You then proceed to exchange your SGD for CNY with this money-changer. The money-changer quotes you a rate of 4.82 CNY/SGD and you think to yourself, “oh, that seems like a good rate! It is quite near to the rate shown on Google”. You need to get a fairly large sum of Chinese Yuan and want to make sure you’re really getting a “good rate”, so you whip out your mobile phone and type “sgd to cny” into Google’s search bar and see this result: You make your way towards a money-changer in your neighbourhood after work.
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