Payments
Card payments
International transactions
7 min
an international transaction involves one or both of the following multi country a cross border transaction, where the country of the card issuer determines the conditions of the transaction multi currency transactions in currencies that the payments processor supports functions the following functions, which the card payments supports, are part of international transactions ofac screening check whether a person or organization in an international transaction is on a restricted list ofac is part of the us treasury department ofac keeps this list for security reasons and to prevent financial crimes for cross border payments, ofac is mandatory foreign exchange rates access the current conversion rate for a pair of currencies the fx rates api returns foreign exchange rates, markup fee, and disclosure data it enables you, the merchant partner, to fully disclose to the customer the rates they should expect to pay for cross border payments, foreign exchange (fx) rates in recommended the same cross river transaction apis serve domestic as well as international transactions currency exchange sometimes, a transaction happens with a us issued payment card outside the us or, it can occur within the us using a non us issued card these transactions require changing from one currency to another the foreign exchange (fx) rates api makes it easy to access the conversion rate for the currencies of two different countries currency conversion rates are indicative this means they are dynamic, not fixed conversion rates depend on the currency pair the network exchange rate real time exchange rates cross river provides you with the real time foreign exchange rate in the currency of the party receiving the payment cross river fx rates reflect the rates now available in financial networks in the case of visa and mastercard, the api responds to a function call with a list of rate data from the card networks these rates can differ between networks they are updated once each day the forex rates api provides clear information about any network processing transactions mastercard rates change every day at 14 05 cst in the us they remain valid for 24 hours let's say a transaction occurred on may 1st, 2023 at 3 00 am cst the rate that applies to the transaction would be the rate set on april 30th, 2023 that rate covers the period from 14 05 cst on april 30th to 14 05 cst on may 1st visa rates change once a day at around 19 00 est (midnight gmt) over the weekend, the system uses the rates from friday use case for example, suppose a customer from sweden wants to buy products from your american online store as a merchant partner, you need to perform an international transaction that's because the customer is buying in kroner (the currency of sweden) products being sold in us dollars cross river provides a call to the fx rate api endpoint you make this call before performing the transaction request these rates are most useful when working with multi currency or cross border transactions in addition to the current exchange rate, the fx rates api also reflects the markup fee a network charges for a foreign transaction for transaction settlement, the currency conversion rate returned by the api may differ from the actual rate of exchange offered in the market the fx rates function call is standalone it returns the exchange rate without actually determining the international transaction api reference learn about the foreign exchange rates api endpoint