The cost of FX for companies, explained

The bank adds a margin (its own mark-up) on top of the rate it can trade at in the market, then quotes you one all-in rate: a single number with the mark-up already inside it. The margin never appears as a fee or a line item. The bank sets it per customer, at its own discretion, and it can change from one trade to the next even when nothing changes on your side.

It varies widely with company size, currency pair, how far ahead the trade settles (the tenor) and trade size, so a single "normal" number would mislead. What a benchmark shows is where you sit against companies with similar flow. As an illustrative example: a company measured at 34 bps against similar companies negotiated down to 11 bps with the same banks and the same volumes. On a EUR 300m annual book, that difference is roughly EUR 690,000 a year.

Yes. The margin is a legitimate price for the service and the risk the bank carries. The issue is information: the bank knows what every customer pays, and you know only your own rate. The FX Global Code, a voluntary industry standard, commits the banks that sign it to be open about their mark-up. Being open on request is still a long way from independent measurement.

The mid is the midpoint between the buy price and the sell price in the interbank market (the wholesale market where banks trade with each other). Nobody can actually trade at the mid. Your trades happen on the buy side or the sell side, never in the middle, so the mid is a reference point, not a real benchmark for what your trade should have cost. Just scores every trade against the real market rate, never the mid: a rate you could actually have traded at, for your trade size and direction, at the moment you traded.

Competition tells you which bank was cheapest on a given trade. It says nothing about whether any of the quotes was fair. All three can quote a wide margin and one still wins. A benchmark measures each trade against the market itself, so competition and measurement answer different questions, and both are worth having. The full comparison: Just vs your existing stack.

Only trades you have already done. Nothing you send is shared with another company. Everything feeding the benchmark is pooled and stripped of names first, and any data that could identify you is deleted when you leave. Just is SOC 2 audited - details at trust.gojust.com. We never contact your banks.

You do. Paid by you, never the bank, so our only incentive is your result. Just earns nothing from your trading volume, from any bank, or from routing you anywhere.

Then you hold independent evidence of it, on the record, for the board and the auditor. Just is a yearly subscription, paid upfront. If the savings we can document in your first year do not exceed what you paid us, the guarantee covers the difference. If your banks are already pricing you fairly, confirming it costs you nothing.