Mystery shopping

Foreign Exchange Rates: Mystery Shopping Study

Perspective were approached by an international asset management group to conduct a mystery shopping study. The primary objective was to obtain foreign exchange rates from the UK’s leading banks to understand the total cost, including all hidden fees charged during an FX transaction – with the belief they would be able to offer an alternative service with greater transparency and at a cost reduction. There were three fee types collected during the audits:

1. Handling/ transfer fees - An amount charged by the relevant banks on top of the purchase price.
2. Exchange rate (mark-up) - Calculated as the difference between the banks' exchange rate offered and the mid-market rate.
3. Transaction/ Receiving fees - An amount paid on receipt of the transfer.

The secondary objective was to understand the customer experience when contacting banks to arrange for FX payments to be made as an SME, and the transparency of the fees upfront prior to a transfer.

Perspective conducted telephone and online mystery shops with leading high street banks and collected the cost of FX payments.  Mystery shoppers represented SMEs (£500k to £20m) requiring FX to pay invoices using the following scenario to capture relevant and comparable FX pricing information: €10,000/ $10,000 will need to be transferred into a Euro/ USD account to pay for an invoice.

Foreign exchange rates were collected from the banks by telephone and online. The fees collected were an average of the audited fee via the two channels. All fees were collected on a single day to ensure exchange rate fluctuations had a minimal impact on the overall findings. The fees were time stamped against the mid-market rate to ensure that the exchange rate provided by the audited banks was in ‘real time’. The study was repeated the following day to enhance the validity of the data collection and ensure any anomalies would be identified.

Based on our results, we recommended that an accessible and transparent FX service (that displays total costs incurred) would create a strong opportunity to secure corporate business as an alternative to the leading UK banks in the FX market.