Data Sources
Priced by the institutions that make the market
Forex data sources, and where exchange rate data comes from: fastFOREX API is a market data aggregator. By combining liquidity and pricing data from multiple institutional sources, we deliver an institutional FX data feed — a forex data feed with a deeper, more representative view of the global FX market.
Breadth you can measure.
100+
FX contributors in our consolidated feed
2,300+
FX trading pairs priced from the feed
170+
Currencies with midpoint rates & conversion
New to FX?
How the currency market works.
A two-minute primer — no jargon required. Already know your way around? Skip ahead to our contributor network.
The market, in a nutshell
There's no central exchange for currencies. Foreign exchange is a worldwide network of banks and brokers trading directly with each other — around $7.5 trillion changes hands every day (BIS Triennial Survey, 2022), making it the largest financial market on Earth. Because there's no single official price, the best view of the market comes from combining quotes across many institutions — which is exactly what our feed does.
Where trading happens
Activity concentrates in a handful of financial centres. London is the world's largest, followed by New York, with Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo anchoring Asia. The dealing rooms in our contributor network sit in these centres — so the prices we aggregate are the prices the market is actually made from.
Trading hours
FX runs 24 hours a day, five days a week. The week opens on Monday morning in the Asia-Pacific, follows the sun through Europe to the Americas, and hands back overnight. Liquidity is deepest when London and New York overlap. That's why our data carries precise timestamps and full timezone support — 'today's rate' depends on where you're standing.
When markets close
The market closes at 5pm New York time on Friday and reopens with Asia-Pacific on Monday. 5pm New York is also the conventional daily cut-off, which is why daily rates and OHLC candles are anchored to it. Over the weekend prices don't move — our API keeps serving the last market rates until trading resumes.
Market turnover figure: BIS Triennial Central Bank Survey, 2022 ↗. Curious how crypto compares? See our crypto data sources.
Jargon, decoded.
Six terms you'll meet on this page, in plain English.
- Market-making bank
- A bank that continuously quotes prices it will buy and sell at — 'making' the market for everyone else.
- OTC (over the counter)
- Traded directly between institutions rather than on a central exchange. All spot FX is OTC.
- Inter-dealer broker
- A firm that sits between the banks, matching their trades with each other — ICAP and Tullett Prebon are examples.
- Contributor
- Any institution whose pricing flows into our consolidated feed.
- Bid / ask
- The price buyers will pay (bid) and sellers will accept (ask) at a given moment.
- Midpoint
- The middle of bid and ask — the fair 'headline' rate used for conversions and reference pricing.
From dealing room to your app.
How institutional pricing becomes the rates you fetch.
100+ contributors
Market-making banks and OTC inter-dealer brokers price the market.
Consolidated feed
Spot/cash FX pricing is combined into a single institutional feed.
Aggregation
Deeper, more representative midpoint and bid/ask pricing.
Your application
Delivered by REST API, WebSocket streaming and MCP.
A network of institutional dealing rooms.
Our consolidated feed brings together pricing from more than 100 FX contributors, including major market-making banks and leading OTC inter-dealer brokers.
Market-making banks
ABN AMRO
ANZ
Barclays Capital
HSBC
JPMorgan
Royal Bank of Canada
Standard Chartered
UBS
OTC inter-dealer brokers
ICAP / Parameta
Tullett Prebon
Tradition
Fenics
A representative sample of the contributor network behind our consolidated feed. All trademarks and company names are the property of their respective owners; their inclusion denotes a data-contribution relationship within our feed network, not an endorsement of fastFOREX API.
What breadth means for your data.
Depth
More contributors means more prices behind every rate — a deeper, more representative view of the market than any single source can give.
Dependability
Aggregated institutional pricing is robust by construction: no single contributor defines the rate, so your data stays dependable when individual sources move or drop out.
Freshness
Aggregated doesn't mean slow. Rates refresh as fast as every second, with hundreds of pushed updates per second available over WebSocket streaming.
Licensed, not scraped
Our feeds are sourced under commercial licensing agreements with institutional data providers — official, approved access to the market's pricing, not screen-scraping or grey-market resale. We tell you where our data comes from because we can.
Data sources — FAQ.
Where the numbers come from, and what you can build on them.
Where do fastFOREX API rates come from?
Is your data licensed?
Are these executable trading quotes?
Why aggregate instead of using one bank's feed?
Which products are built on this feed?
Build on institutional-grade data.
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