You’ve hit an internal limit and you have to wait a few days for it to cool down. Try again after a week and with smaller amounts.
Transferring funds via bank transfer might have fees and it takes a day (via top up, things are instant and I need this at the moment)
I hit a limit but where, at Unicredit or at Revolut? What should I tell to customer support to check, because at the moment both said it looks ok at their part.
You’ve hit a hidden limit at Revolut. They won’t tell you about it, but it’s there (I guess to prevent fraud). I experienced that myself and the support said I should try again after a few days.
You could try a different card to top up.
It seems inconclusive, if the daily top up limit for newly added cards kicks in, the error message is more specific. I am paraphrasing, but in this case, the app tells you (or used to tell you) that you’ve reached that limit and that you can try to top up again after 24 hours. It’s not a generic “transaction declined” message.
Unicredit was the first bank in Europe to offer SEPA instant credit transfers, if I remember this correctly. I’d check if Unicredit offers instant transfers in your region, and if this would be an option. Revolut supports instant SEPA transfers as well.
If it is indeed Revolut’s automated top-up limit that kicks in here, you’re out of luck. It’s automated, and Revolut support can’t manually override it. You can check more about this in the official FAQs as well. It’s called “card deposit limit” there.
Yes it is that generic message you’ll receive. It’s also not a daily limit. I would guess it’s a weekly or a 48 to 72 hour limit.
Like I said I experienced that myself and was irritated by that message.
Have you ever reached that shadow limit and got a message yourself in the past or recently?
Not recently, years ago.
So it’s an additional limit to the limit that is documented in the FAQs, you’re saying? And other than in @RevolutUser69 's case, Revolut support confirmed this, instead of responding “Your top-up request was declined by your bank”?
I provided everything I have experienced. I am pretty sure when @RevolutUser69 tries it again in a few days it will work just fine. It is also a good idea to start with lower amounts to see if it will go trough - sometimes i.e. 500 € will fail but 300 € will work. It is also possible that a top up with Apple Pay will fail but a direct top up with a card will go trough.
This does sound awfully similar to the mechanism explained in the FAQs.
One option we haven’t recently mentioned is to try another card. The limit I am aware of is card based.
Actually I did mention to try a different card.
A bit of history:
- on Friday I was able to top-up with multiple transactions around 8400 euro
- on Saturday, multiple transactions, around 8400
- on Sunday only around 4000.
- today no transaction
There were like 20-30 transactions in total, every day I tried more, even today, but doesn’t work (I tried with 500 euro, not less).
With bank transfer I get a commission, so it’s not worth it, what I gain on exchange, I pay on transfer commission.
I made a plan with 8000 euro daily, but on Sunday that went away…
This is what I would go with. If that statement by Revolut is true, your best chance to get informations about what’s happening would be Unicredit support. If they are willing to check their backend systems, they can find out why a payment failed. Revolut most likely doesn’t have this information. It’s not about everyone saying it looks okay. It’s about finding out specifically why earlier payments failed.
(This is just a guess, but based on the informations you’ve provided, my assumption is that this problem isn’t about the daily card top up limit.)
Here’s something slightly off topic: when Revolut started in 2015, every account had a money laundering related limit for all incoming funds. I can’t remember, 25k or 50k or something like that. The app would show you how much of that limit was left. And for incoming transfers above that limit, you had to provide additional source of funds documentation (like a payslip for example).
Revolut got rid of that rigid limit years ago, but they’ve neither confirmed or declined explicitly if there’s still some sort of “shadow limit” for every account. They’ve said, I am paraphrasing, that the fixed limit was replaced with a more fancy AI algorithm thing that “scores” every account individually with a point based rating system that eventually triggers AML warnings when hitting a threshold.
Also, card top ups are very expensive for Revolut. Maybe you did max out on some other limit like Regalia suggested that isn’t security related but simply a way to limit card processing fees. Since regular bank transfers to Revolut are free and instant for me, I’ve never tried card top ups with larger amounts. I could be wrong, but this might be an edge case, and with questions related to edge cases, Revolut’s customer support isn’t always the most reliable.
Did you tried using a different card, too?
IIRC under the Money Laundering regulations, they are not allowed to be specific 
Sure. The question many were interested in back then was if Revolut did in fact get rid of this limit or if they just didn’t show it in app anymore.
I did attend a presentation where Revolut spoke about their AML technology. This presentation convinced me that they’re using nowadays a somewhat “traditional” internal rating system. They claim it’s more precise and less sloppy than what traditional banks do (traditional banks are indeed bad at AML prevention and tracking), but false positives became a problem. To an extend, where they pulled the plug, reverted back to the old system and rewrote the new model.
My guess is now that volume is of course one of the metrics they’re tracking for the rating system. But if that became a problem here, it should have prompted a source of funds check. I just thought it might be somewhat of interest. One of the possible questions I can see myself asking Revolut would be if I could provide any additional source of funds documentation if that’s what’s causing the problem. But it wouldn’t be the first route to pursue, evidence seems to point in different directions.
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All the money is on one card, so I can’t test with another card.
Probably it is some scoring, some limit, but since it’s my name on the account I am taking money from, I would say it’s pretty clear it’s NOT money laundering.
Why I do the top-up thing: I heard that there were instances where Revolut blocked the money and it took a long time until everything was resolved. I don’t have the time right now, I need to make some payments urgently and with top-up I can send smaller chunks instantly, rather than a bank transfer that might take a day (and there is also a fee for this, just checked) - so this is less risky. But I wasn’t expecting some random limit meddling with my plans.
Source of funds checks would be broader. They would also be about how the money ended up on the account from which you’re transferring to Revolut.
Good point. But I don’t think making a bank transfer from account in your name is considered more or less risky than making card payments with a card in your name, and I would be surprised if splitting up a large sum into many payments in a short period of time can fool AML checks. If anything, I would consider this to be more suspicious.
My strongest hunch is that it’s more or equally likely that Unicredit is causing the problem. I am not claiming that it can’t be Revolut, but based on the informations available, I wouldn’t rule out that Revolut’s statement that the card issuer denied the payment is correct. Unfortunately, you need someone from Unicredit to be willing to check one of the failed transactions. It’s not conclusive alone getting confirmation that your limit is high enough.
If your Revolut account would have been flagged because of AML, the app would most likely tell you so.
Oh, and if you still need to transfer more: I would consider Wise.
So the way I do the things is:
- transferring euros from my Unicredit account to Revolut
- exchanging to local currency at Revolut
- sending the local currency from Revolut to Unicredit local currency.
The initial plan was to do it with small parts, if it would be blocked, I wouldn’t continue with the rest. So request, exchange, send to unicredit, request, exchange, send to unicredit. This was why it was important for top-up to work, because it’s faster. I did in the morning a bank transfer and it still didn’t arrive.
Thanks for all the info. Probably I will just exchange at Unicredit, with a worse exchange rate, because I need the exchanged money fast.
Another thought, you’re talking about transferring EUR. If your country of residency is a SEPA member, a transfer to Revolut in EUR would fall under the SEPA regulation. Meaning, it’s not an international transfer. The bank would not be allowed to charge you more for this than they would for a local EUR transfer.
(If the local currency isn’t EUR, or when the bank already charges fees for local EUR transfers, a transfer to Revolut would cost the same fee.)
I understand your logic about trying to stay “under the radar” and test it out first with small amounts. But my concern would be that any transfer at any point can trigger AML/security checks. It’s risky either way, and I would be prepared for AML checks.