Ask HN: Why do large companies still get currency conversion wrong?

1 point

11 years ago

I've been browsing Azure's pricing and I noticed an HTTPS call to:

https://azure.microsoft.com/api/v1/currencies/conversion/

Browsing the returned JSON data it appears to list rates for each currency.

USD being:

     "usd":{
         "name":"USD",
         "locale":"en-us",
         "glyph":"$",
         "conversion":1.0,
         "commitmentBase":{
            "firstTierLow":500,
            "firstTierHigh":14999,
            "secondTierLow":15000,
            "secondTierHigh":39999,
            "thirdTierLow":40000
         }
      }

NZD (New Zealand Dollars) being:

     "nzd":{
         "name":"NZD",
         "locale":"en-nz",
         "glyph":"$",
         "conversion":1.2238,
         "commitmentBase":{
            "firstTierLow":650,
            "firstTierHigh":19199,
            "secondTierLow":19200,
            "secondTierHigh":51199,
            "thirdTierLow":51200
         }
      }

However looking at Google's financial data, based on SIX International, their current rate for USD to NZD is 1.48.. Leading to an almost 20% difference in pricing based on currency.

How does this pricing problem still affect commodities like CDN's and servers nowadays?

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