Hi,
It will deduct from your primary A/c FIRST, then any other currency you may have, Finally dipping into you crypto ( IF you have any) You can, however, ‘Freeze’ you BTC A/c.
As a workaround, in some of the cases you are capable to switch (deduction) currency at the merchant. (Ex.: amazon.de) There I could switch between GBP and EUR all the time, because the merchant would deduce in EUR, but the card currency and locality is set to GB.
That’s just following regulations 
A merchant should charge you always in the local currency (EUR in case you are at Amazon.de). And if they offer DCC, the customer needs to be informed about it and must be given the opportunity to not agree. That’s basically what Amazon is doing here.
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I have a question regarding Airbnb: CHF is set as my base currency and I want to pay for a housing in the US in the local currency via Airbnb. If I now change everything on my revolut account to USD with no amounts left in any other currency, will it accept my payment in USD?
I think this could be possible because it’s a prepaid credit card and if there is no other option than USD they will accept it. The other options would be that either my USD will be transferred into CHF because Airbnb forces it to do so or that the whole transaction won’t be possible and I’ll get an error message. Maybe it would also transfer my USD into GBP since the revolut card was issued in the UK.
Has anyone already tried that or knows how this whole thing works?
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It would be nice if Revolut implemented the same system as the Curve card for this.
Curve lets you set/change the currency for any of your linked cards at any time.
This avoids confusion and a lot of the cases described here.
That would be a change of philosophy. I’d rather like the idea of defining an order, like Bunq has implemented it, I believe. Hard-wiring a currency to a specific card might result in other problems that could result in double exchanges when DCC is applied for example.
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Let me share my reason for wanting this functionality:
I’ve been working in the UK and have made quite a bit of savings in GBP. I now live in Hungary.
Occasionally I would gain some EUR through refunds or receiving some from other people. Thus I tend to have a lot of GBP and little EUR on my account.
What I would like is to have Revolut spend my GBP for HUF transactions, because I have much GBP, and I would like to save my EUR for the times I would spend in the Eurozone to be able to avoid the overhead of conversion.
But instead what happens is Revolut spends from my EUR.
That’s why I myself would like to be able to change my default currency.
Ideally in the future, :R: will allow users to use any currency (from GBP to ZMW to HKD to AUD) as a base currency.
Right now, I think it may be possible for the functionality that you described to happen (e.g. Hold balances in both GBP and EUR, but only spend via GBP).
If you disable your EUR currency account (from my understanding) you will be able to receive EUR but not spend it.
So therefore if GBP is the next largest balance, then GBP will be used as the currency for spending (if you spend with a currency that you don’t have enough balance in, or not a :R:-supported currency).
If you disable your EUR currency account (from my understanding) you will be able to receive EUR but not spend it.
If that’s true, that could be a decent solution… however in that case I’m worried for the cases when I make online payments unsure of the currency they’re intending to charge me with; if in EUR, I’d lose an opportunity avoiding a conversion.
It’s an inelegant and ad hoc fix for sure, but you can toggle your EUR currency account on and off.
In terms of looking at what currency a payments processor intends to charge you… it should be relatively clear if the payments processor is legitimate and well-known.
In terms of looking at what currency a payments processor intends to charge you… it should be relatively clear if the payments processor is legitimate and well-known.
It’s usually the other way around.
With smaller vendors that usually operate in a single country, it’s obvious what currency it would charge me in. But with international vendors such as airlines or hotel booking websites I’m never too sure whether it’s the local currency or some other currency they’d be charging me with, showing me the prices in multiple currencies.
But this is one of the reasons I’m really happy with Revolut, that I don’t have to worry about these things, because conversion rates are great.
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I don’t know if I have the same problem as you, but I noticed something strange.
When I had my first payment with a physical card, I needed to change currency on the terminal, because the default one was GBP. I live in Poland and when I open my Revolut app I can see PLN account. The second payment (contactless this time) was in PLN, so I think there might be a slight problem with non-contactless payments. Is there any way to make the card act according to settings in the app? I’d like to avoid changing currency on the terminal.
You were subjected to DCC ( Dynamic Currency Conversion), as Revolut is identified by the terminal as a UK card. Basically it’s a scam to get you to choose GBP instead of the local currency and so suffer a bad exchange rate. You should never choose GBP but always pay in the local currency.
This blog entry explains it further. It mostly relates to ATMs but the principle is the same for POS terminals:
Another related use case:
- I am from Romania, RON
- my income is in EUR
i have both physical cards from ING,
and currently use EUR a lot.
Am I forced to RON ?
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I’m struggling with this too… I’m in Euro country, so I guess my base currency is EUR.
I’m trying to buy some things online that I want to pay in GBP, but when I put my card number in, the online stores seem to automatically change currency to EUR, using their own unfavourable exchange rate.
I’m currently having trouble with this with Ryanair and it seems to be the same with ebay uk and paypal. How can I force this companies to charge me in GBP not EUR?
It depends. For PayPal, you need to change the settings of the card. For Amazon, check the Amazon website and how to turn the currency converter off.
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it’s a different problem. in your case the card number tells the retailer you prefer EUR which happens to be their preferred currency as well (Ryanair is based on IRL) so they will charge you in EUR.
the main issue I see with the “base currency” is the automatic exchange.
e.g. your base currency is PLN, you have EUR and PLN balance on :r: and you purchase online in… GBP, your PLN will be exchanged. If it’s weekend you’ll be charged a large weekend spread (2.5%+) instead of 0.5% as if EUR would have been your base currency. And if you don’t have PLN the transaction would be declined even if you do have EUR.
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I too have this problem, I explained over the chat that on ATMs with dual currency it always defaults to their local currency. Which for me is a hassle, I am currently working in Romania so if I want to get euro or pounds for a trip I need get in the local currency and the go to an exchange house to get the currency I want and pay a fee.
My credit card on the same ATM let’s me choose what I want, why can’t revolut enable that?
Or why can’t they make it a premium option to change the base currency?
Seems very silly to me that you can’t do this, and the people in the chat are like a broken record on this.
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Sadly that’s my problem as well.
I have a RON card from ING and I would like to use Revolut for EURO not again… RON.
@anon33247966 Hi!
Romania’s base currency is RON but we are part of EU and we pay many things in EUR as well, how can we change the base currency from RON to EUR?
Thx!
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What’s exactly the problem? You can exchange, hold and use EUR in the app, and if you’re paying with Revolut in EUR, it will use a EUR balance when funds are sufficient. How would you profit from EUR as base currency?