Add FX Wire Support

Modern Treasury has now added support for foreign exchange wires through Wells Fargo and Silicon Valley Bank. For users who have enabled FX support with their bank, initiating a payment order in Euros (for example) is as simple as making the following call:

In order to give users more flexibility with FX wires, we've added 3 parameters that can be passed when creating a new payment order.

1. charge_bearer

Allows you to pick who will pay for any wire charges. Oftentimes if a wire transfer flows through an intermediary, that bank will subtract money in the form of wire charges directly from the wire and forward the remainder onwards. This can result in your counterparty receiving less than the full amount you were intending. To counteract this, you can use charge_bearer parameter to indicate who will bear the wire charges. Can be one of sender, receiver, or shared. If not set, banks will often default to shared but this is specific to your setup with the bank. The following example sets the charge_bearer to sender which means you will pay all the fees on behalf of your counterparty.

2. foreign_exchange_indicator

Allows users to switch between Variable-to-Fixed payments and Fixed-to-Variable payments. As the names imply, a Variable-to-Fixed payment involves debiting a variable amount from your account in one currency and sending a fixed amount in another currency. For example, let's say a foreign vendor invoices you for €1000.00 but your account is denominated in dollars. In order to pay the invoice you would pass variable_to_fixed as the value for foreign_exchange_indicator. This case is relatively common so by default if you pay in a currency that is different from your account's, the foreign_exchange_indicator will default to variable_to_fixed.

Less common is the Fixed-to-Variable payment scenario. As an example if a foreign contractor invoices you in dollars but can only accept euros, you would pass fixed_to_variable as the value for foreign_exchange_indicator. This would result in a fixed amount of dollars being debited from your account and depending on your bank's exchange rate, your counterparty will receive a variable number of euros.

3. foreign_exchange_contract

Allows users to pass in any FX contract numbers that they have received from their bank. For example if your bank passes you a contract number "B1-66ER" that must be placed on the wire, you can attach that to the payment order with the following API call:

If you're a current Modern Treasury customer and would like to enable FX wires through your bank, reach out and we can help you get started.