This web site started as a personal project at the University of Tampere, Finland, in the summer of 1995. The web was still in its infancy and the few existing web sites that provided exchange rates were not very well suited for those who were interested in currency market risk analysis and risk management. Most sites were also very American dollar centric, and the data visualization was pretty much non-existent.
Rates, as it was called till 2004, was created to fulfill those needs. At the beginning it was written entirely in Mathematica and parsed together with several shell scripts. Shell scripts were soon replaced by Perl, but the three megabyte disk quota was really limiting!
The site soon turned out to be quite popular among FX professionals, Fortune Global 500 companies and ordinary people. More features were added and Perl replaced more and more Mathematica.
During the fall 2003 - summer 2004 the whole site was completely redesigned and rewritten in Perl. The old name, Rates, was replaced by RatesFX and the hosting was moved away from the University of Tampere, Finland.
All foreign exchange quotations provided by RatesFX are unofficial average cross rates calculated from data supplied by many data sources. Cross rates are, however, usually quite close to direct quotations because of foreign exchange markets' efficiency. Quotations are only valid for big interbank transactions worth USD 1 million or more. Please use other services if you want something else.
The functionality behind the RatesFX web site has been written in Perl by Matti Tukiainen. Some web pages use PHP and JavaScript. With the exception of some GPL'ed modules, the code is not public. GPL licensed modules are distributed with the Relax log analyzer.