While ordering currency online and topping up pre-paid cards are now commonplace convenience practices, individualised promotions, mobile-based exchange and ever-more engaging customer experiences are all evidence of the currency exchange industry’s increasingly inventive approach.
Innovating For An Exceptional Customer Experience
“We partner with airports to drive the best customer experience through great service, multiple channels, innovation and an expert team of friendly front-line colleagues,” said Steve O’Donovan, Travelex Partners & Business Development Director.
We need only look to the companies delivering them to see how demand for foreign exchange services is growing. Global leading provider Travelex makes a foreign exchange transaction more than once every second, and supplies more than 37 million retail customers a year with 80 different currencies. “We operate at 106 airports, through 1,500 stores and 1,250 ATMs, and can be found in 10 of the world’s 20 busiest airports,” said Steve O’Donovan, Travelex Partners & Business Development Director. “Driven by our global reach, we understand the global traveller better than anyone else.” Its multi-channel sales approach helps grow transactions at airports, and Travelex works in unity with its airport partners to achieve the best customer experience and drive innovation.
Travelex has historically pioneered new and inventive products in the market. Its e-Commerce offering is highly advanced – outbound customers can place online currency orders for collection just four hours in advance – while its mobile-optimised site enables a simple and streamlined mobile purchasing experience, and next Travelex will develop a number of mobile apps. On-airport Travelex has used proximity-based mobile marketing, whereby potential customers walking past its stores are sent an SMS promoting its services, and it is now rolling out new state-of-the-art digital rate boards providing customers with timely and relevant messages.
“Recently we have established the ‘Travelex Accelerator’, set up to research and develop the latest state-of-the-art innovations in currency exchange and international payments,” O’Donovan said. “Travelex is heavily investing in bringing an innovative card proposition to market which has successfully launched as ‘proof of concept’. This product has the potential to revolutionise how people pay for things abroad.”
Service Without Limits
Moneycorp’s CEO Mark Horgan: “Airports are at the heart of what we do. An airport is a high profile global village, and lots of people pass through the airports in which we’re present – they are definitely a flywheel for the growth of our business.”
UK-based Moneycorp, meanwhile, experienced unprecedented growth last year – its retail business unit increased by more than 58% with the opening of 39 new airport stores. “We’re clearly seeing the recovery of the travel market, the recovery of the international housing market and increases in import/export volume, all of which play to our strengths,” said Mark Horgan, Moneycorp’s CEO.
Alongside its rapidly-growing ATM fleet, prepaid card with 14 currencies, and unique Reserve and Collect service, which offers the better of the two rates between booking and collection, Moneycorp is now changing the face of on-airport exchange with the development of its new “barrierless” retail concept. It will soon introduce walk-through bureaux, designed to remove the barriers between customer and corporation and equal the level of service offered by the increasingly high-end shopping experiences that customers have come to expect from airports.
“That means removing glass fronts from stores and taking the counters out – so stores won’t look like traditional square windows where people queue in the corridor, but will be like a normal retail store that will invite people in,” Horgan explained. The first of the remodelled stores will come into being in June, just four doors down from the first John Lewis department store in Heathrow’s soon-to-open Terminal 2, and will be followed by a second in London Stansted. “It’s quite a subtle change, but I think it’s quite an important change in people’s expectation of service,” Horgan said.
