The Central Bank of Costa Rica (BCCR) announced on Thursday that it will submit the changes on the calculation of reference exchange rates for the purchase and sale of the United States dollar to public consultation.
The reference exchange rate is the amount in which banks and other financial institutions offer dollars for sale and purchase.
With the new methodology, the daily calculation would take into account the transactions that are made by buying and selling dollars during a period of six hours, in which the volumes traded are greater and the differential between average exchange rates of buying and selling is lower.
At present, the term used for the calculation is three hours.
The changes would be facilitated by the fact that the Central Bank now has online information on exchange transactions carried out with the public.
According to the Central Bank, these changes will more appropriately approximate the average exchange rate of all exchange transactions in the economy.
In the opinion of the monetary authority, this will benefit many economic agents, since there are a large number of transactions carried out at these prices, including small amounts, contracts in foreign currency settled in national currency, payments for credit card transactions, bank loans, service fees and other smaller window transactions, which require a better indicator of the cost of the foreign currency.