Our new Foreign Exchange app for Chrome is launched!

Last week I talked about our new NetBank app that appears in the Google Chrome Web Store. I was speaking to the team at Google and they said, we were the first bank in the world to have a banking app in the Web Store.

The best till last

Well this week we have our next app ready and I reckon it will be just as popular as our first. To be sure it’s not the first Foreign Exchange (FX) app in the Web Store but I reckon it’s the best.

Banking is pretty simple, people borrow money (you owe us), people lend money (we owe you), or people transfer money.

The global economy

The thing about transferring money overseas is you just never know what is happening with the exchange rates. People now have lots of reason to think about exchange rates, it could be because you just bought a 4.99 book on your kindle and want to know if was cheaper than the book exchange or you’re about to go on your first overseas trip and want to know how much it will cost.

Our new FX app for Chrome just made understanding foreign exchange so much easier. I’ve been playing with it over the last few days and these are the things I really like about  it:

  1. It’s a Chrome app, which means every time you open a new tab in Chrome it’s a whopping big button, so it’s easy to find.
  2. You can select your own rates (and we have a huge amount to select from). I like to check out GBP, USD, NZD. EUR and CHF. This is a combination of my shopping habits (USD, GBP) my holiday habits (EUR/CHF) and NZ is a really great destination for cycling holidays.
  3. It’s one of those apps that has a memory…  it remembers all your preferred currencies (clearly only on the same computer) and even your previous calculations.
  4. You can get a graph of exchange rate movements. This sounds great but my tip is, don’t sweat it on the cents. If the rate is good then just go for it. If the exchange rate is dropping or the AUD tanks then that bike or holiday will seem really expensive and it’s probably time to wait for a better time. I know this, because I once sweated on the Japanese Yen (JPY) going up 1c and it dropped 20c. All I can say is we ate a lot of rice on that holiday!
  5. Finally for our NetBank customers, we let you deep link straight into NetBank which makes it really easy to buy your next travel money card, send money overseas or even order foreign cash.

Give the app a go and give us your feedback.

If you want to download it go the Google Chrome Web Store Page