I’ve noticed recently that I used my Revolut card while in a shop, didn’t have enough funds in my EUR balance, so on the fly the amount was drawn from my Bitcoin balance and converted to EUR and paid for my purchase.
I prefer to do conversions between my balances manually, but I can understand that (many? most?) people may consider this a useful feature.
However I’d like to ask Revolut to enable those of us that want it to prevent automatic all-balances access (for lack of a better term).
Here is my reason why. Some time ago I was victim of card fraud via my Revolut card (this has been solved since, with Revolut support, thanks for that). The card got skimmed somewhere and the thief first tried to spend 1600 GBP, when that wasn’t possible (not enough money), he tried 800 GBP and succeeded.
It’s fairly easy to top up Revolut so I didn’t really have a practice of keeping large sums on the card, preferring to keep around 200 EUR balance on it and top up as needed. The fraud incident convinced me that it’s the correct approach.
Enter crypto. I have accumulated some Bitcoin using Revolut. Not talking enormous amounts but significantly higher than the 200 EUR balance I would normally keep there.
So now if my card gets skimmed again, the thief can potentially withdraw/spend much more than I am willing to risk – all because it will be automatically taken from my Bitcoin stash.
This is why I’d like the option to ring-fence some balances and make them unavailable for card purchases. Bitcoin in my case, but other use-cases are possible. Someone might choose to keep a large balance in one currency (say, EUR) and only keep a small balance in another one that he is currently spending in. Or even, someone might want to keep a lot of EUR in his account, in a “savings” balance, but still have a separate “transactional” EUR balance, that would allow him to limit the amount that can be spent without additional manual action being needed. This would increase safety significantly.
Note that separated balances are kind of similar to having daily/weekly/per-transaction spending limits (which we also don’t have now), but in my opinion they are a better implementation of the idea, allowing finer grained control.
And the best thing is, it should not be hard to implement.
