I am at home in The Netherlands with my Dutch Revolut card in a Dutch shop at a Dutch ATM trying to withdraw EUR money from my EUR Revolut account. Couldn’t be more straight forward than that.
While trying to get money form the machine it was asking me about a GBP conversion. Which totally perplexed me.
Where does the GBP come from?
Why is Revolut making it confusing, as everything is NL/EUR based? I mean, the conversion was not about Russian Rubel or USD, but very specific on GBP. The whole conversion question is totally irrelevant and shouldn’t have been asked at all!
The ATM recognizes the card as british and therefore guessed it must use a GBP balance, which is true for most cases. There’s not much :r: can do about this except issuing cards with BINs from another countries (which is already happening), but it was not :r:'s decision at all to offer you this conversion, and you should decline it.
Revolut is a company incorporated in England and Wales
Paysafe* is also a British company
Wirecard* is a German company
*former relationship but still matters
If you can’t stand clicking an extra button when withdrawing money, you could ask the in-app support team about the chances of getting a card with issued in a country with euro as its currency
No offense and many thanks for your responses. I appreciate you taking the time to take a strawl with me.
I just don’t understand why the conversion question is there in the first place, with everything being NL/EUR based. As per your suggestion, it probably means there is some UK tag associated with the card. Which is a bit of a surprise to me.
The point is not “clicking an extra button”. The point is the confusion, which IMHO is totally unnecessary.
Bottom line. Revolut is a British company and the cards are issued with BINs (Bank Identification Number) which the ATM (and any other merchant) interprets as a UK card, hence offering DCC, which, as Juliopp said, you should refuse.
If you don’t want the hassle, then you will have to opt out of Revolut until and unless they offer cards with Dutch BINs
We’ll get nowhere here. Get in touch with the in-app support team and ask if there’s any way for you to get an EUR-based card (they do exist AFAIK) and if you manage to get one come and share your experience
So it seems that by definition everybody is getting a UK card with an inherent preference of conversion into GBP.
Regardless of country or base currency.
Call me stubborn, but I do find that very silly from a operating/use case perspective.
There is a looong Spain thread in the forums discussing this as Spain is notorious for “cheating” with the DCC. If i remember correctly they are beta testing Spanish issues cards. So there is hope for the future.
That’s quite heinous. People typically use Revolut and other similar services because they don’t want this kind of rubbish forced on them.
Perhaps they should look into a code that ignores the main currency that the card is issued in? Specific to cards that can be used for travel. Maybe XXX instead of the currency code for the country it’s issued in, for “it can pay in whatever, so don’t worry about anything”, thus they won’t need to bother with DCC.
Are the card payment currencies a set specification and will machines reject ones that don’t fit it?
I don’t think this is possible. I am pretty sure that this is handled by a 3rd party and that Revolut only sees the final price e.g. the price after dcc.
An FX company that also do a travel card with multiple currencies have sorted out with MasterCard a way to beat DCC. As of sometime in 2019 if I remember correctly, there will be none for them. Thus the solution must exist.
@Recchan - merchants’ card terminals have no way of identifying the currency of a card, only its country of issue, using the IIN/BIN (first 6 digits of the card number). Merchants’ card terminals make incorrect assumptions that a UK-issued card must be denominated in GBP.
I first had this problem in 2002 when I had a EUR-denominated Visa card on a EUR bank account in the Channel Islands, which are part of the UK banking system. It used to really irritate me, particularly as the card had € symbols all over it.
I’m experiencing the exact same thing now. Every time I go to withdraw cash in a UK cash point, thats free, with my UK Revolut card, I am asked if I want to accept fees. I was charged £30 the other day to withdraw £250. This is an obscene amount to overpay. I am now hesitant to take the risk of withdrawing cash again, for the fear of being over charged. Revoluts help team have been utterly useless in helping me with this matter. I just dont know why it is asking me everytime I put my card into a cash point. Does anyone know how to resolve this matter, without getting rid of my card and using another bank?
That is pretty disturbing to hear. Just to be clear, does this happen at every cashpoint machine or just one in particular? When you say ‘UK Revolut card’, I presume this means your address is in the UK. Do you have just a GBP account or other currencies as well? If it was £3 you were charged it might be annoying when you expected to pay nothing but in some cases it is not unheard of. However £30 is just not right, it sound to me like some sort of conversion is going on from another currency, but we really need more details.
