Oanda Corporation
The OANDA Corporation is a financial services provider of currency conversion and trading. OANDA is one of the largest non-bank Futures Commission Merchants that specializes solely in spot foreign exchange. OANDA is an outgrowth of the Swiss Olsen Group, created to serve as an internet trading platform to automate techniques exploiting the group's 20 years' worth of research in foreign exchange trading.
In 2000, OANDA partnered with Thomas Cook to offer overnight or second-day delivery on traveler's cheques or any of 100 different foreign currencies through their web site, Oanda.com . Money sent in this fashion was shipped without an indication as to the sender, in order to reduce the likelihood of theft during the delivery process.
Oanda.com also offered free currency conversion tools, tables of historical data, and news and analysis through a multilingual interface, as well as non-financial conversion tables likely to be of use to international travellers, such as temperature conversions between the Fahrenheit and CELSIUS scales, quantity conversions between English units and the Metric system, and even equivalent shoe sizes for different nations. In 2005, OANDA published The Forex Trader's Bill of Rights.
WebTrends estimated a stable base of more than four million users for Oanda.com in June of 2000, and at that time the company reported that its technology had been licensed to more than 13,000 online merchants. Oanda.com was able to claim a minimum of ten million page views per month by March of 2001.