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Who thinks about charging customers in their own currency and keeping those profits to avoid single-currency risk?

This isn't a product I'm working on but I'm interested to see if other people are as nerdy about currency diversification as I am.

Given you have a business producing excess profit such that you don't need to have all the money back in your personal bank account, it seems like a good long-term strategy to both not disadvantage customers who have currency devaluations and also diversify your dependence on a single currency.

For context, I've lived in three countries in the last few years (Australia, then Singapore, now New Zealand) and currency changes have a huge impact on the actual profit/loss of the business. I have customers in Australia paying in AUD and cloud provider bills in USD. As the AUD devalues against the USD, I make less profit month on month.

I suppose if you live in the US and only ever intend on spending time in the US (same applies for UK, EU etc) then the single currency isn't necessarily visible to you. Currency changes can wipe out entire (relative) income from interest, stock market increases, or property gains.

My ideal scenario would be charging customers in 5 or so currencies, receive the money in those currencies and if I choose to do so, invest in the same currency. If any one currency drops, your business earnings don't go with it.

I'm aware of plenty of scenarios where this wouldn't work, but I'm interested to hear if anyone else thinks about this.

on October 15, 2019