The decision to accept payments in USD, GBP, and EUR was made at the beginning of our Naora programme and it was not a marketing decision. It was the operational acknowledgement of a design intention: the programme is for the global member and the global member’s financial life is denominated in the currencies of the major economic centres where the global professional class operates.
The member in New York does not want to convert USD to EUR to pay for the membership and absorb the currency conversion cost and the unfavourable exchange rate that the single-currency programme imposes on the non-European member. The member in London does not want to use GBP to buy EUR to pay a Belgian company. The member in Singapore or Dubai or Sydney who uses USD as their international transaction currency deserves the USD payment option as a baseline rather than a concession.
The three-currency payment architecture is the financial architecture of the global programme. It distributes the currency conversion cost fairly, the member pays in the currency that their financial life is denominated in, and the Naora programme absorbs the conversion rather than imposing it on the member. The EUR payment is not the privileged option and the USD and GBP payments are not the accommodated alternatives.
All three are the standard options for the standard member of a programme that has no single-currency home market.
The Escrow and the International Member
The escrow account structure, the protected account that holds the leg fee until sixty days before the departure date, is the same structure for the international member as for the European one. The member in Singapore who pays the leg fee in USD to the escrow account has the same protection as the member in Brussels who pays in EUR. The escrow does not discriminate by currency or by geography.
The funds are protected from the moment of the transfer to the moment of the sixty-day release. The currency of the transfer is the currency that the member’s financial situation makes most practical. The protection is the same regardless.
The credit card options: Visa, Mastercard, American Express, extend the payment accessibility to the full global membership. The member whose financial architecture is built around the American Express rewards programme has the Amex option available regardless of where in the world they are based. The member whose international transactions run through the Visa corporate card has the Visa option.
The three-card, three-currency payment architecture is the most complete standard payment offering available for the global professional market. It was designed that way. The design was the signal of the intention. The intention was always the world.
