Have paid for a holiday in South Africa using my debit card and bank have charged me nearly £200 in a non sterling transaction fee. Would this happen if I was using Monzo card?
Hi. Welcome to the community!
So long as you always select the local currency when asked (and when not!) the answer is no
HSBC use that exact term as I know to past cost
Monzo wouldn’t have charged that fee, no.
Any transactions where you type your card details in are completely fee free - Monzo doesn’t charge anything. They don’t mark up the exchange rate and they don’t charge a non sterling transaction fee.
The exchange rate they use is the MasterCard exchange rate, which is very close to the mid market rate you’d find on google.
When you’re using the card in person, as long as you’re always paying in the foreign currency and letting Monzo do the conversion to £’s, then it’ll be fee free. As @SouthseaOne mentioned, sometimes merchants offer to do the exchange for you (but charge fees). It sounds like they didn’t do that in this instance though as you were charged a non sterling fee by a bank.
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Monzo uses the MasterCard rate with 0% bank fee.
As an example today 10000 rand purchase would cost £544.11 with 1 ZAR = 0.054411 GBP
https://www.mastercard.co.uk/en-gb/consumers/get-support/convert-currency.html
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