Supporting EMU Currencies and the Euro

Countries that joined the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) before February 2002, can only use the euro as their legal currency. Countries that joined the EMU after February 2002 can still use their national currency and the euro during the crossover period. By default, accounts in crossover countries use a primary account currency and a secondary account currency. These two account currencies handle the process of converting to the euro. They allow customers to pay in euros or in their native EMU currency until the conversion to the euro is complete.

When customers in EMU member countries create an account, they can select either the euro or the EMU as their primary account currency.

When the primary account currency is an EMU currency, BRM automatically assigns the euro as the secondary account currency.
When the euro is used as the primary account currency, the customer can choose an EMU currency as the secondary currency, or choose no secondary currency.

Note:

You can specify whether BRM requires a secondary currency when the euro is the primary currency. See "Changing Currency Conversion Rates".

Using the Euro and EMU Currencies in Your Price List

You cannot convert directly from one EMU currency to another EMU currency. You must use triangulation, that is, convert from one EMU currency to the euro and then from the euro to the other EMU currency. There are several implications of using triangulation:

If you have customers from many countries, you should use the euro as the system currency. That way, all currency conversion is between the euro and EMU currencies, and never between two EMU currencies, because you cannot convert between account currencies.

If you must use an EMU currency as the system currency, you should make sure that customers who have an account currency different from the system currency cannot purchase charge offers by using the system currency. To do so, use the euro as the primary currency for those accounts.
Restrict all charge pricing to use either the euro currency or the national EMU currencies, but not both. This ensures you do not redefine the EMU to euro conversion ratio and charge two different amounts for the same service.

Handling Euro Conversion Rounding Errors

Converting between the euro and EMU currencies can result in rounding discrepancies. To allow BRM to accept these rounding discrepancies without reporting an error, you define currency error-tolerance values for EMU currencies.

You set the currency error tolerance separately for each EMU currency. It can be based on a percentage or on minimum and maximum amounts of the total amount billed.

Use PDC or Pricing Center to set error tolerance.

Example of percentage tolerance

You might set the percentage error tolerance amounts for French Francs to 98%:

If a customer pays in euros for a 100 FF charge, and the euro amount converts to 99 FF, the payment is accepted.
If a customer pays in euros for a 100 FF charge, and the euro amount converts to 97 FF, the payment is not accepted.

Example of amount tolerance

You might set the minimum and maximum error tolerance amounts for French Francs to 3:

If a customer pays in euros for a 50 FF charge, and the euro amount converts to 49 FF, the payment is accepted.
If a customer pays in euros for a 50 FF charge, and the euro amount converts to 46 FF, the payment is not accepted.

Example of percentage and amount tolerance

If you set both an error tolerance percentage and a tolerance amount, the tolerance percentage overrides the tolerance amount. For example, you might set the percentage tolerance to 1% and the minimum amount tolerance to 5. The customer pays in euros for a 1000 FF charge, and the euro amount converts to 992. The percentage tolerance is met, so the payment is accepted, even though the amount minimum has not been met.

Rounding Errors for Overpayments and Underpayments

By default, BRM ignores conversion errors for overpayments and credits the excess to the customer's account. For underpayments, BRM uses the tolerance settings if the customer pays in the secondary currency. You can change how BRM uses the tolerance settings in PDC or Pricing Center.

In addition, you can specify how tolerance values are applied to primary and secondary currencies. See the underdue_tolerance and overdue_tolerance entries in the CM configuration file (BRM_home/sys/cm/pin.conf).

Changing Supported Secondary Account Currencies

To limit the EMU currency choices, edit the /config/currency/supportedcombinations object.

Make the following changes to the object:

Delete entries for currencies that you do not want displayed.
Delete the PIN_FLD_CREATED_T field.
Delete the PIN_FLD_MOD_T field.
(Optional) To use the euro as the primary account currency without using a secondary currency, change the secondary currency required field to 0:
```
2   PIN_FLD_CUR_SECONDARY_REQ   ENUM [0] 1 
```
Note:

To set the default secondary currency, move the currency entry to the top of the list of supported currencies. If a secondary currency is required, and the secondary account currency is not supplied during account creation, the default secondary currency is the first supported currency listed.

Stop and restart the CM after editing the object.

To verify that you changed the fields, read the object by using the testnap utility or by displaying the /config/currency/supportedcombinations object in the Object Browser.