Getting hold of your holiday money can be a hassle – an expensive one too.
You know the holiday money drill. Rushing to buy currency and paying eye-watering exchange rates. Carrying all that cash around. Struggling to top up your prepaid travel card (after being declined when paying at a restaurant). Leaving cash on your prepaid travel card which you’ll never get back. Or opening a new bank account just for travel, topping it up, and managing yet another balance. Getting home from your holiday and finding unexpected charges on your bank statement. Does any of this sound familiar?
Currensea travel debit card
That’s how holiday money was before we created Currensea the UK's best rated travel debit card – inconvenient, confusing and expensive.
To understand the simplicity of the Currensea travel card solution, it’s useful to start with some basics around bank charges and live exchange rates.
Tourists lose out to bank fees and charges every time they go abroad. Using the usual bank debit or credit card abroad typically attracts non-sterling transaction fees, foreign currency purchase fees, and fees for cash withdrawals.
A non-sterling transaction fee for debit cards varies between 2.75% and 3%. On top of that, banks often apply a flat fee between £0.50 and £1.50 for each debit card purchase. Cash withdrawals attract an additional foreign cash fee of 1.5% to 2% or a flat fee of up to £1.50 plus whatever the local ATM provider might charge.
Even some of the so-called fee-free cards have strings attached. For example, their free spend may be limited to a certain amount, or only apply at certain times (such as weekdays only). Credit card cash withdrawals abroad may affect your credit rating and hit you with interest on that withdrawal from day 1.
The fees vary a lot and are often hidden among the terms and conditions. So you would need to do some very detailed research to find out how much you’re actually paying in charges on every trip.
Exchange rates, while on the face of it pretty simple, are actually a lot more complex than meets the eye.
Banks use interbank exchange rates to buy and sell currencies amongst themselves. This is a wholesale market for currency, which up until recently only banks could use. Interbank exchange rates are the best exchange rates you can get and they can change hundreds of thousands of times per day. Unfortunately, the benefits of this system are rarely passed on to you, the consumers.
UK banks issuing debit or credit cards are obliged to use card scheme rates. The vast majority of high street bank debit cards are Visa based, so use Visa rates. A couple of facts about these rates:
Currensea applies a flat markup of 0.50% above wholesale rates. It doesn’t charge anything extra. The price is confirmed immediately, so the price that pops up in your email alert is the final price.
We support all currencies. To start with, we’re using the interbank exchange rate for the 3 most popular currencies including – EUR and USD. We’ll be adding more currencies to our interbank list in the coming months based on customer demand. All other exchange rates will be based on the Mastercard rates.
This structure allows us to give you average savings of 85% on your holiday money vs high street banks, depending on who you bank with.
Until now, the options for achieving pricing like this involved a lot of hassle, a lot of faffing around and a lot of avoiding extras buried in small print. Currensea has changed all that by providing a travel debit card with simple and transparent pricing, and convenience of connecting directly to your high street bank account. So you have the convenience of your bank, just without the charges, anywhere in the world.
