I am a newbie to Revolut. I topped up my card from another card in euro. I received a message that my account was in BGN and the exchange rates of my bank would apply.
Thanks!
Hello @Zaro,
The rule is that you should top up in the currency that your bank account is held in. For example, if you have a UK bank account make sure you top up in GBP. If you don’t your bank will convert the money for you and charge a huge fee!
Because you’re based in Bulgaria and the local currency is BGN, needs to be converted to Euro, as you can currently hold, Eur, USD and GBP on the app.
Thanks for the reply. But my account in Bulgaria is in Euro. I topped up from a euro account to a euro account and I I received this message. I hope it is clear now.
Thank you for clarifying this. Is your card a Bulgarian one though?
Yes, it is Bulgarian.
I’ve got a similar “problem”. I usually top up my Revolut card from a EUR account via a UK issued Mastercard. It works very well, but every time I top up, I select EUR and the app asks me “Are you sure? Your card seems to be a GBP card.” It doesn’t really bother me, but it would be nice to preset the currency and maybe even the amount for top ups with a certain card. One click top up instead of auto top up.
Yes, this happens with my Citibank card, which I can set either to deduct from my Euro account or from my Sterling account (or USD, but the Revolut charge is too high for USD topups). I guess Revolut is trying to warn users who may have made a mistake, and can’t easily account for our kind of scenario. I’m happy with Revolut providing a warning, as a check. I just ignore it and the topup in Euros goes fine with no conversion on my bank’s side.
This is a common problem whereby merchants (in this scenario Revolut is a merchant) falsely identify a card’s currency according to its country of issue. As I understand it, merchants can identify only the country of issue, not the underlying account’s currency.
I used to have a EUR-denominated UK-issued Visa card, on which merchants frequently tried to carry out dynamic currency conversion to GBP whenever I used it in the Eurozone. This was because the merchants were correctly identifying the country of issue as the UK and then using that to incorrectly determine that the currency was GBP.
Revolut, as a card issuer involved in multi-currency cards itself, should avoid making this same error when acting as a merchant.
Hm, I wouldn’t call it an error. More an inconvenience. Because you’re fine if you read the notifications of the Revolut app during top up. It would be just more convenient to have the ability to add the currency as a preset to a stored card.
1 Like