Central Bank Rates MCP Server: Official Exchange Rates for AI Agents

When an AI agent handles an invoice, a customs declaration, or a tax filing, the exchange rate it needs is not the live market rate — it's the official rate some institution published: the ECB reference rate, the HMRC monthly rate, the Bank of Japan's fixing. Until now, MCP-connected assistants could fetch live mid-market rates from our first MCP server, but official rates meant leaving the conversation and digging through central-bank websites.

Today that gap closes. @allratestoday/central-bank-mcp is a new Model Context Protocol server that gives Claude Code, Cursor, Claude Desktop, Windsurf — any MCP client — direct access to the published rates of 60+ central banks and tax authorities, with per-date lookups, full history, and a one-call comparison across every institution.

Why AI agents need official rates

We recently asked our customers what they actually use the API for. Every single respondent was running machine-to-machine or AI-agent workloads — accounting automation, compliance pipelines, agent frameworks. For those use cases the mid-market rate is often the wrong number: an auditor doesn't care what the interbank market said at 14:32; they care what the ECB published that day. Official rates are fixed, dated, citable — exactly the properties an autonomous workflow needs to produce defensible output.

Install in one line

For Claude Code:

claude mcp add central-bank-rates -- npx -y @allratestoday/central-bank-mcp
claude mcp env central-bank-rates ALLRATES_API_KEY=art_live_xxxxx

For Cursor or Claude Desktop, add this to your mcp.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "central-bank-rates": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@allratestoday/central-bank-mcp"],
      "env": { "ALLRATES_API_KEY": "art_live_xxxxx" }
    }
  }
}

A free API key covers the latest published tables — no credit card required.

The five tools

• list_central_banks — every covered institution with its code, country, home currency, and latest publication date. The assistant calls this first to resolve "the Sri Lankan central bank" to cbsl.
• get_official_rates — a bank's published table, or one pair, latest or for any date. Weekends and holidays roll back to the rate legally in force, and the response says which publication date applied.
• get_official_rate_history — a date-by-date series for one pair. The tool description warns the model that history is billed by volume (about one call per month covered), so an agent won't accidentally burn your quota on a ten-year range.
• compare_official_rates — one pair across every bank in a single call, with min/max/median and spread in basis points. No other provider offers this.
• get_publication_calendar — the dates a bank actually published, values-free and available on every plan. Gaps reveal holidays and weekly or quarterly cadence.

Prompts that now just work

• "What HMRC rate should I apply to this March invoice in EUR?"
• "Compare the official USD/LKR rate across every central bank that publishes one."
• "Pull the ECB's USD reference rate for every day of Q1 and put it in a table."
• "Did the US Treasury publish a new rate this quarter, and what date is in force?"

Honest derivations, no mixed sources

When a bank doesn't publish a pair directly, the server cross-computes it via that bank's own home currency — never by blending other banks' tables — and flags the result derived with the method used. Stale sources (the US Treasury publishes quarterly, and its rate is legally in force for months) are returned but excluded from spread statistics, so a quarter-old table can't distort the comparison. Full details in our official rates methodology.

Which server do I want?

Both, usually. @allratestoday/mcp-server answers "what is EUR/USD right now" from live interbank data. @allratestoday/central-bank-mcp answers "what rate am I required to use" from published tables. They share one API key and run side by side in the same client config.