T212 card FX rates

🤝 Help
1

Before someone goes to town on me, yes I have tried doing a basic research on these questions but please can some kind soul or someone from T212 please confirm what exchange rate will be used when I use my card to spend in Iceland (so, either in ISK or EUR)?

Will I be charged anything extra if I withdraw, say, ISK or EUR in Iceland?

For ref, my base currency is GBP and all my money in Invest is in GBP. I’m trying to understand if at the end of the day T212 would be better for card spending compared to Chase, Kroo or Barclaycard Rewards credit card.

Thank you in advance.

2

It’s 15bps above the live interbank rate, so probably better for ISK yes. For EUR I generally find it’s a coin toss.

3

It’s the usual 0.15% FX fee that T212 charges on investing also.

It’s better than 1-3% other banks and cards charge.

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4

from T212’s site it seems ISK isn’t supported which means it will default to mastercard rates apparently. do we know if 0.15% is added on top of that too?

5

the banks/cards i listed don’t charge a penny on FX, and that’s why i listed them separately

6

Yes, I meant other typical banks and cards

7

Starling bank which uses MasterCard rates have just introduced a conversion feature to work out rates abroad and the rates seem almost identical to T212 rates (using T212 card page) the example I was doing was;

100 GBP = 51.09 AUD (T212)

100 GBP = 51.30 AUD (Starling)

Seems there’s only pennies in it so apart from cashback the FX rate seems almost identical to Starling (which is conveniently missing on the T212 comparison page)

Edit: actually MasterCard rate with no fee from Starling bank seems better in my case for bigger amounts by a few pounds.

8

I did some analysis a while ago, it generally flip/flops between the two for currencies with a narrow spread. It was particularly noticeable for PLN / GBP

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9

Interesting, but I suppose what T212 are selling is that there is no fx fee with the T212 card like some other banks charge. Eg Barclays 2.99% fee In addition to MasterCard rate which is a rip off. But I was just discovering if you compare T212 card with Starling there is not much difference with FX rate as there is no fee with Starling and just the mastercard rate alone. (Maybe same kind of idea with Revolut)

10

They’re definitely not doing this. Because there is.

11

Its my understanding both Chase & T212 should be using same midpoint fxrate.

If cashback is applicable, T212 should come out a ahead of Chase. I don’t know about Kroo or Barclaycard Rewards.

With cashback

  • T212, +0.15% -1.5%., net 98.648% [ $$ * fxrate * 0.98648 ]
  • Chase, +0 -1%, net 99%. [ $$ * fxrate * 0.99 ]

Without cashback, Chase will be slightly cheaper, $$ * fxrate vs $$ * 1.0015 * fxrate. I.e. for every 100GBP, T212 will cost 15p more.

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