Currency Code

Currency codes are three-letter abbreviations that identify a country’s currency.

The International Organization for Standardization publishes currency codes in a list referred to as ISO 4217.

The vast majority of these codes contain two characters referring to the country and a third character related to the currency unit.

For example, the ISO 4217 code for the pound sterling is “GBP” – the two first characters refer to Great Britain (GB) and the third one to the pound (P).

In the foreign exchange market, these codes allow traders to eliminate potential confusion caused by names designating more of one currency such as with dollar, peso, pound, or krona.