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Cape Town – With the sharp fluctuations in the rand, South African entrepreneurs involved in the foreign exchange market can easily find themselves in financial pain, warned a treasury expert.
Umkhulu Consulting’s Adam Phillips, whose rand commentary appears often on Fin24, said most small and medium sized enterprises can’t afford the real-time market information services available.
The result is delayed currency information, which can have detrimental effects on the overall business, he said.
That’s why he decided to find a solution to this problem, by creating an affordable, customisable online resource that enables entrepreneurs to track their open positions 24/7 from any device.
“The idea is to assist small and medium companies from the sidelines, making them feel part of the financial markets that affect their business,” he said. “It is not a trading tool, but I believe it is an important from an advisory perspective.”
The platform, Umkhulu Online is powered by Thomson Reuters and all data is real time, or very slightly delayed.
There is also an online forward calculator to allow users to assess their exposure across all of their instruments simultaneously. “The calculator looks at rates in the future using the current spot rates, while allowing users to use the data to assess current exposure,” said Phillips. “As with the forex quote section, it gives the user ‘two way’ pricing.”
Users can personalise their page to view foreign exchange rates that are pertinent to their business. They can load commodity prices, interest swap rates, economic data from various countries, interest rates and equity indexes from around the globe all on one page. And once set up the user saves this as their own personal page for immediate access to information across all devices.
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