I had recently spent 300 euros in ireland and my revolut balance was also in euros. To my surprise I am being charged 12€ more as the transaction has been paid on pounds and converted back to Euros. I have euros as balance and the bill was also in euros, do not know how pounds currency came into picture. There is a 4% excess charge because of this. Though I shared the receipts, the customer support is not able to help. This must be a bug in their system. Totally disappointed with the service.
Are you sure it wasn’t the merchant converting the currency?? If the merchant recognises that it’s a UK card then they will convert it to £ and then back to € again which is why you may have been charged more. This is known as Dynamic Currency Conversion (DCC) and the exchange rate on this is usually very poor.
If this is the case then it’s not Revolut who would have done the transfer. It would have been the merchant as you should always request that any goods are paid for in the native currency
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I’m using Revolut in Ireland at the moment. It works everywhere, but literally 9 times out of 10 the terminal offers to convert to GBP. Definitely need to keep an eye, as while most retailers ask first, some don’t and will just click through the conversion to GBP.
I used it in Hertz and the receipt says the currency is euros. I have checked with hertz too. Not sure who is at fault. Since its a prepaid card it should get debited in the base currency applicable to that country. Which in my case is euros. It’s difficult to monitor each transaction. Since the charge was big, I could spot it.
Well, it is not that easy. DCC - dynamic currency conversion, is applied by the POS terminal or the ATM. It has nothing to do with the base currency of an account or a card.
Look at how a POS terminal determines the “currency” of a card: via the country code of the card number. Since the Revolut card is issued in UK, it got a UK country code. And POS terminals have no idea about Revolut’s currency exchange features and that it is a multi currency account. So, being issued in UK, a connected GBP account is a fair assumption for a dumb POS terminal.
I agree, yes, a card should be debited in the local currency. But DCC is a way of making money for payment providers (and maybe shop owners, I don’t know). Like ATMs that often offer currency conversion for foreign cards.
Check this forum, this has been discussed here a lot.