Any leads on a reputable currency conversion data source?

Question

I have to build a currency converter widget and I would like to know if anyone knows of an api or regularly updated data source to get up to date currency conversion rates?

Answer 1

http://www.xe.com/ - they offer a datafeed that you could parse

Answer 2

Do you need current or historical?

Current is very easy to find.

If you need historical, the NY Federal Reserve has data series of currencies compared to the US dollar in XML form. If you're willing (and can afford to) parse them on your server side or even the client, they may come in handy

http://www.newyorkfed.org/xml/fx.html

Answer 3

Google Finance has an API (http://code.google.com/apis/finance/) and you can use various currency symbols to get data about conversion rates (e.g. GBPUSD to get the value of the pound in US dollars)

Answer 4

We had a need to use conversion sites for international share transactions (only for estimates of course, the user got the exchange rate that was active when the trade went through, written into the contract to cover us legally).

OANDA was the provider, we used the FXConverter tools if I remember rightly.

They had both real-time and historical information for absolute bucketloads of currencies.