ECB Missing Rates 30-Jan-2021
The European Central Bank (ECB) publish FX rates every weekday, from the Euro (EUR) to 33 major currencies.
Over the years, the rates published have been extremely reliable and authentic, and many FXLoader clients load the rates into their ERP for accounting purposes. This could be as the main source for those needing a small set of rates, or an addition to a wider source of market rates.
What Happened on 30-Jan-2021
We noticed an issue with the rates the ECB publish for download; they were only available for 30-Sep-2020, nothing since:
As above this applies to all formats. The XML format download is available here https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/eurofxref/eurofxref-daily.xml and shows this:
The latest rates for Friday 29-Jan-2021 are available on the main rates page https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/policy_and_exchange_rates/euro_reference_exchange_rates/html/index.en.html– these are different to the download rates, which really are from 30-Sep-2020:
What is the Impact?
Anyone using one of the Download formats to pull the rates from the ECB will either find no rates (if there is date validation) or will pull incorrect rates (if there is no date validation).
This has happened at a weekend, when ECB do not publish new rates anyway. But it is also a month-end which is never a good time for issues that affect accounting.
How can this be Fixed?
We are sure the ECB will fix the issue soon, though of course there is no obligation on them, as this is a free service. Meanwhile, getting the 29-Jan-2021 rates manually from the page above is the only option.
How has FXLoader Resolved the Issue?
Most of our clients load rates every day, our process automatically goes back to Friday for rates to load into Saturday and Sunday. However, no rates were available at all for any date since 30-Sep-2020 in any Download format, so action was needed.
So, we used our backup process to manually copy and paste 29-Jan-2021 rates into a spreadsheet from the ECB webpage, and load those into a central location in the FXLoader Cloud Service. Then we switched the ECB source to point at this central location so all our clients pick up rates from there. This was all done on the afternoon of Saturday 30-Jan-2021 to shield our clients from any impact.
UPDATE: ECB have resolved the issue, looks like sometime on Sunday 31-Jan-2021, so everyone should be good for month end. We will shift FXLoader back to the main source once we’ve seen it stable for the rest of the day.