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Is anyone aware of any valid standards or ISO's for how to best display currency in multiple formats (ex: US dollars and Australia dollars)? I believe this is the only one I could find: iso_4217

Are there any additional ones?

I also cannot find any standards on how to round currencies consistently. For example, it's standard in the US to refer to $50,000 as "$50k", are there any similar standards that can be used for currencies consistently, even in the above US dollars and Australian dollars scenario?

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  • Regarding K for 1000, here is a better place to check – Mixing use of K for thousands and MM for millions (english.stackexchange.com/questions/181917/…)
    – Ren
    Jun 14, 2019 at 12:39
  • thank you @Ren, i've reviewed that link previously. however, i dont see a clear conclusion, and it doesnt really remark on what to do for other non-english speaking countries. i keep assuming there must be a standard that financial institutions and the like use globally for consistently displaying data. for example, when showing a cost in dollars it may only be 3 numbers, but other currencies may be significantly larger and we are looking for consistent ways to display the conversions (ex: $5000 as 5k USD = 54k JPY)
    – mmezo
    Jun 17, 2019 at 12:07
  • If it is made clear to the users that the content is in US English then you can easily go ahead and use 50K for 50,000. In my work, the brand standard stipulates that all content be in US English although we explicitly do not mention it on the site. Perhaps time to look into it. However, we still do not use short notations as these and try to keep things global as much as possible. We have been successful in avoiding these so far (we consider Tokyo as well). So, please try to avoid it as much as possible.
    – Ren
    Jun 17, 2019 at 12:13
  • it does not appear avoidable in certain situations. Training users or specifying the content is US-centric would not be viable and seems like a bit of a cop-out. Thanks for the thoughts tho. i just have a hard time believing there is no standard (perhaps in the fin-tech world?) that could be adopted
    – mmezo
    Jun 18, 2019 at 18:50

2 Answers 2

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The three letter ISO code is the standard and globally accepted. Being used in all sorts of Foreign Exchange displays, it is also commonly found. However, there are no standards for using K for 1000 and so on. Ren’s comment above will indicate that there are other notations available for the same. So these can only be used within specific geographic regions only where these are commonly used.

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Yes, every official currency has its own 3 letter code (USD, AUD in your case), you can safely use it. It works well when you have many different currencies.

But it is not as cool as $10M notation. So if you only use US Dollar, Euro, and Pound Sterling it is easier to use their special sign. Some other currencies also have their own symbols. For me if you massively use signs for different currencies at one place it quicky becomes too noisy. So I'd recommend to use boring 3 letters abbreviations in this case.

Also note that different languages have their own traditions of formatting money: fraction comma instead of fraction point, currency sign before or after sum and so on. Maybe you can just rely on available localization methods for your platform.

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  • thank you, yes we need to support basically any currency so we have decided to use the 3 letter codes related to the ISO i posted. any thoughts on being able to round up large numbers, or any standards around that? (similar to the 10M USD for $10,000,000)
    – mmezo
    Jun 14, 2019 at 18:15

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