Are you looking to create an app that requires financial data, such as live currency exchange rates? If so, choosing a reliable real-time currency API that provides highly accurate and up-to-date data is crucial. The currency API makes it easier to integrate real-time exchange rates into your app, providing a structured way to access financial data for various currencies in one place. In contrast, without a real-time currency API, you’d have to manually find and gather exchange rate data from various sources and compile it to display on your app.
Moreover, using an accurate real-time currency API improves the reliability of your app and enhances user experience. For instance, travellers visiting foreign countries can rely on your app to get accurate real-time exchange rate data and get the best rates when converting their national currency into the currency of their destination country. Similarly, businesses and investors will trust your app to get real-time exchange rate data for financial analysis, foreign transactions, and international trade.
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Understanding Real-Time Currency Rates
Currency exchange rate means the value or rate at which one currency, such as USD, can be exchanged for another, such as GBR. Real-time currency rate means the live and up-to-the-minute value of one currency with respect to another. Businesses and investors often need real-time exchange rates for foreign investment, international trade, risk management, financial analysis and planning, and more.
However, since the global currency market is volatile, exchange rates fluctuate constantly. In fact, they can go up and down within minutes. These fluctuations depend on numerous complex and interrelated factors, including inflation, interest rates, politics, public debt, and capital flow. For instance, if inflation is high in a country, export prices increase significantly, resulting in reduced demand. Moreover, as inflation increases, supply in the market also increases, weakening the country’s currency.
Since exchange rates significantly impact the profitability of businesses, the cost of goods/services and foreign investments, businesses and investors want highly accurate real-time currency rates.
Benefits of Integrating Live Financial Data In Apps
Builds Users’ Trust
When you source live financial data for your app from a reliable source, you can provide up-to-the-minute currency rate data to users. This increases their trust in your app and improves user retention.
Improved Decision-Making for Users
Real-time currency rate data enables investors, traders, and businesses to make informed decisions based on current rates and save time and money. This is crucial because currency rates fluctuate constantly and significantly impact decision-making.
Enhanced User Experience
When users can get access to real-time and accurate currency data that can help them make the right decisions, it improves the overall user experience. Moreover, users are more likely to engage with a financial app that provides accurate real-time currency rates.
Market Analysis
Live and accurate currency rates enable businesses and investors to understand current market trends and patterns and formulate effective strategies accordingly.
How to Choose the Right Real-Time Currency API?
Today, a number of currency APIs are available in the market. However, not all APIs are made equal. That’s why it’s essential to carefully choose the right currency API for your app. Considering the following factors can help you make the right decision:
Accurate and Up-to-the-Minute Currency Rates
Data accuracy is crucial in financial apps, as inaccurate data can cost users a lot of money. Thus, users are always looking for highly accurate and up-to-the-minute currency rates. Unfortunately, not all currency APIs are as accurate as they claim to be. That’s why assessing the data accuracy of the real-time currency API you’re choosing is crucial. To do so, check the data sources of the API. A reliable real-time currency API sources data from various trustworthy financial institutions and data providers.
Additionally, you can check customer reviews, especially those related to the accuracy and real-time data of the API, to assess the API’s data accuracy.
Supported Currencies
Your app can have users from any part of the world. Choosing a currency conversion API for your app that supports various world currencies will allow you to build an app for a global user base, allowing users to convert any currency to their desired currency.
Ease of Integration
Choosing a real-time currency API that integrates seamlessly into your app is essential. Otherwise, you’ll be spending lots of time and effort integrating the API, and it can also affect your app’s performance. An easy-to-integrate API has a straightforward authentication process, an easy-to-understand response format (typically JSON), an intuitive interface, clearly defined rate limits, and detailed documentation.
Extensive Documentation
Check whether the currency API documentation provides all the details about the API’s capabilities, endpoint, and parameters and contains example codes in various programming languages. This makes the integration process quicker and easier.
Response Time
The response time of the API significantly impacts the app’s speed and performance. Users want a financial app that works seamlessly and provides data instantly. Thus, choosing a real-time currency API that returns data within milliseconds is crucial.
Scalability
When your app is new, you may need limited API calls. But you’ll need more API calls when your app’s user base grows. Thus, it’s essential to choose a scalable currency API that can efficiently handle a large volume of API requests without compromising performance.
Introducing Fixer: A Currency Conversion API for Easy Financial Data Integration
Fixer is one of the most accurate real-time currency APIs trusted by thousands of developers and companies, including Microsoft, Samsung, instacart, and Kraken. The API has also received thousands of positive reviews from satisfied users worldwide, praising the API for its accuracy, reliability, real-time data, advanced features, speed, performance, and ease of integration.
Features
Here are the key features of Fixer API:
- Fixer API’s six years of experience and rock-solid data sources make it a highly reliable currency API. The API sources data from various trusted financial data providers, and banks, including the European Central Bank, provide highly accurate real-time exchange rate data.
- The API can update the real-time data every 60 seconds, 10 minutes, or 1 hour, depending on your preference and subscription plan.
- In addition to live currency exchange rates, Fixer also supports historical rates (all the way back to 1999), allowing you to create a comprehensive financial app that provides both real-time and historical data.
- Fixer supports 170 world currencies, including USD, EUR, GBP, JPY, and many more. Thus, you can use the API to create a currency conversion app that enables users to convert any currency of their choice into another currency.
- The API also offers a separate ‘Conversion’ endpoint, allowing users to convert any amount from one currency to another.
- With Fixer’s ‘timeseries’ endpoint, you can request daily historical rates between any two dates.
- Fixer also comes with a fluctuation endpoint that allows users to retrieve information regarding daily currency fluctuations.
- Fixer has extensive documentation consisting of all the details regarding the API endpoints, parameters, and events. The documentation also provides various coding examples to help you get started quickly.
- The API returns data in JSON format within milliseconds.
- Fixer offers a completely free plan that supports 100 monthly API calls, hourly updates, and historical data.
How to Integrate Live Financial Data in Your App With Fixer API?
Here’s how you can use Fixer API to integrate real-time rates:
- Sign up for Fixer to create your free account
- Obtain your free API key available in your API dashboard
- Use the following URL to make an API request for fetching real-time exchange rates:
? access_key = API_KEY
& base = USD
& symbols = GBP,JPY,EUR
Note: You can set your desired base currency and requested currencies.
- Here is an example PHP code for getting real-time exchange rate data:
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// set API Endpoint and API key $endpoint = ‘latest’; $access_key = ‘API_KEY’; // Initialize CURL: $ch = curl_init(‘https://data.fixer.io/api/’.$endpoint.‘?access_key=’.$access_key.”); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); // Store the data: $json = curl_exec($ch); curl_close($ch); // Decode JSON response: $exchangeRates = json_decode($json, true); // Access the exchange rate values, e.g. GBP: echo $exchangeRates[‘rates’][‘GBP’]; |
Here is an example API response:
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<p><span style="font-weight: 400">{ "success": true, "timestamp": 1519296206, "date": "2024-02-04", "rates": { "GBP": 0.72007, } }</span></p> |
Note: the default base currency is EUR
Conclusion
Integrating real-time currency rates enables you to provide accurate and up-to-the-minute currency conversion rates to your users, such as businesses, investors, and traders. It helps them make informed decisions related to foreign investments, international trade, etc. and enhances your app’s overall user experience. One of the best ways to integrate real-time currency rates into your app is to leverage a reliable currency API like Fixer. A real-time currency API makes financial data integration into your app quick and easy. It sources data from various reliable sources, compiles it, and returns the data in easy-to-understand JSON format.
Try Fixer for free and get highly accurate real-time exchange rates for your app today!
FAQs
What are real-time exchange rates?
Real-time currency rate means the live and up-to-the-minute value of one currency, such as USD, with respect to another, such as EUR.
Is there a free currency API?
Fixer is a reliable currency API that offers a free plan that supports 100 monthly API calls, hourly updates, and historical data. The API also has multiple flexible pricing plans, offering more API calls and 60-second updates.
Which is an accurate real-time currency API?
Fixer is a leading currency API trusted by thousands of developers and businesses worldwide for its accuracy. The API sources data from reliable financial data providers and banks, including the European Central Bank, to provide highly accurate real-time currency rates.
