Daft question but.....

I’m reading posts which refer to having more than one balance (different currencies) on my Revolut card.

How does that work please?

Think of it as three accounts in one. You can have USD, EUR and GBP in your account at the same time, and the balance and history are maintained separately for each currency. Card transactions are charged in the currency they were made in (given sufficient balance).

As trulove says… And, if you are going travelling to the Eurozone or to a USD country, it’ll pay to transfer a balance into EUR or USD on a weekday prior to travelling, when markets are open, because that way you avoid the surcharge when you use your card abroad at weekends.

So when I tried the test transfer from £ to € and back again last night
(thereby losing 2p) the app was using real-time exchange rates?

Yes.

If you make it through that whole thread, you will get some insights on interbank rates and how currency exchange works with Revolut.

https://community.revolut.com/t/weekend-exchange-rate-surcharge-clarification/4483/13

@Frank For the record, that thread (started by yours truly) was about card transactions, and it surfaced that a different, separate bid (i.e. not mid-market) rate applies to them, which the app only shows ex post.

@Grahamnbutler’s situation is that he used the currency conversion in the app, which does use the mid-market rate and shows it in advance (edit: it appears it doesn’t, and in that case the rate shown is not the one used for the conversion). Also, no weekend surcharge applied, since he did it on a Wednesday.

I don’t think there’s any problem here. Assuming the GBP/EUR exchange rate didn’t change much between the two conversions, it would only amount to a commission of 0.2% per transaction, and in reality even this is perhaps mostly due to rounding as @Grahamnbutler was only exchanging the relatively small amount of 5 GBP.

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Sure. I recommended the tread because it explains the exchange topic at length. That is why I said it is important to read it fully to get all the background infos.

There is a difference between “sell” and “buy” interbank rates, which alone would explain the loss of a GBP-USD-GBP transaction, even if all rates involved would stay exactly the same during the experiment.

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Frank and trulove

Your patience in explaining the wider issues around the exchange rate mechanism is much appreciated. I absolutely get it now.

Thanks again.

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@Grahamnbutler, you’re welcome.

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