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Comment by samwillis | Hacker News Reader

Awesome, congrats guys. We have been using the BETA since the start and its been very good.

If anyone from Stripe is reading, in your announcement you say:

"In addition to keeping the best parts, we've also built multi-currency support: the ability for UK businesses to charge customers around the world in US dollars, British pounds, and Euro. We'll automatically handle all the conversions for you and deposit daily into your bank account."

My understanding was that we would need a USD account in the UK in order to charge customers in USD. Have you now fixed that? I can't find anything in the docs? Or are you saying that we can just charge people GBP no matter where in the world they are?

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> Have you now fixed that?

We've fixed it :-)

Awesome, thanks Patrick.

How do we do it?

Thanks pc, cannot reply to your comment yet.

In the docs https://stripe.com/docs/api#create_charge there is no reffrence to exchange rates. Do you return a response that shows what the exchange rate was and so how much we will be paid in GBP after charging in USD? (paypal (yuck) do this)

Hey, charge responses now return a reference to a balance transaction (which represents what you'll actually be paid in).

You can auto expand the balance transaction upon charge creation by passing expand[]=balance_transaction, or you can retrieve the balance transaction directly: https://stripe.com/docs/api#retrieve_balance_transaction.

Would that not bundle all the USD payments for the day into one conversion?

I would be very keen to have an individual conversion on each card payment as that is how our internal database sees the world.

Right -- those are per-charge, not per-day.

Ah, yes. I was distracted by cake in the office and missed that this is a new endpoint on the API. I thought you were talking about the transfers endpoint.

This is exactly what we wanted. Thanks!

Cake in the office is a great thing to be distracted by. (:

Do you disclose anywhere the basis for calculating the FX transaction rate? I'd be interested to know how you do this before actually having a clients transaction convert.

Just specify a different currency in your charge and everything else will automatically do the right thing -- it should be a 3-char change. (We'll automatically convert charges to the currency of your bank account.)

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Not quite; they add another 2% fee to convert to £GBP unfortunately.

I don't understand this, you can put decent volume through a forex broker and get conversions at something like .1% Surely it would make sense to do this at cost for customers?

Granted your bank will probably want a decent chunk for doing the conversion for you.

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