At present a transaction for circa -4 EUR will appear in the EUR account, with details of the purchase and the exchange rate used on the associated statement. Nothing happens in the USD account at all.
That’s all correct but it’s not the way I see things, or the way I’d like the transaction to occur.
How about the following?
In the USD account a “pre-purchase exchange line” appears (perhaps in a different colour) showing 3USD being generated for the USD account by selling an appropriate number of EUR. (Likewise an exchange line will have to appear in the EUR account to explain the departing EUR.)
Now there are 5 USD on the account it’s OK to make the purchase and it appears as -5USD in the USD account.
The final account balance is now zero.
Would prefer a system like that because:
a) I’d like Revolut to use up balances before performing further conversions;
b) For me, the purchase was a USD purchase so it’s confusing to have to look in the EUR account. (And will be even more confusing when I’ve forgotten all about it in a few months time.)
If users are 50/50 on such a system it could be turned on and off by a preference.
Thank you r1234 for putting my thoughts into words. But I think this should be optional to switch on/off. Also in terms of allowing to use currencies from other accounts. And I think there also appears question which currencies are going to be used first. I’m not even sure at the moment how it works now. Probably in the sequence we have our accounts? So when I have USD, EUR, GBP then this should be the sequence to automatically “pre-purchase exchange” if it’s allowed by the user.
I agree that this is unlikely to be implemented as it introduces more complication.
say that “We don’t take funds from more than one currency balance at a time” and having one transaction in the Real World result in one transaction on the app seems a good principle to stick to.
Otherwise, you could potentially have a scenario where you have relatively small balances across several different currencies and if you trigger a transaction that’s larger than the balance in any of them then the app would have to start hunting through various accounts, making debits against each one (starting with the base and the largest) until the amount of the payment had been reached (obviously it would need to pre-check that there was enough total balance to do this beforehand).
All transactions that were in USD get a little US flag next to them, whichever account they are appear in (i.e. even if in the Euro account);
Then we get a filter in Analytics for these USD flags so we can view all USD transactions in one place in date order. Actually I don’t see the “country” filter as being very useful since I’ve already got a list of different countries and haven’t actually been anywhere. Just shopping on the internet. “Currency” would be a much more useful filter - to me, at least.
say that “We don’t take funds from more than one currency balance at a time” and having one transaction in the Real World result in one transaction on the app seems a good principle to stick to.