Reply To: Some good news from Curve?

[JDB]

@masaccio – I was trying to be fair/generous to Revolut in noting that you might get points.

However, the underlying issue is that agonising over whether Currensea, Revolut, Curve or any other card offers the very finest rate is a total waste of time. At the point of use, you have no idea what rate will be applied to your transaction. A ‘live’ rate on one of the 16 Currensea pairs may or may not end up looking good vs Mastercard/Visa – nobody knows. You can also be impacted by trading blips that can work for or against you.

I notice that the ‘live’ Currensea rate GBP/USD (1.2759) is identical now vs my response to you at 23.24 yesterday, so perhaps they have a weekend special as well, since there is still a live market, albeit a thinner one than usual. One can also observe discrepancies on big currency pairs between say Reuters and Bloomberg.

Your original thesis posted yesterday that somehow Curve might now be catching up with Currensea and Revolut was fundamentally wrong. They are each different products with their individual merits/demerits with different subscription and/or transaction fees and terms, apply different currency rates at different times and treat some currencies differently to others. They each get you round the mainstream card high FX fees, but isn’t possible to make a generalised comparison of one vs the other in terms of rates or which is ‘better’.

My other point was that you are talking about such fine differences in rates to create a saving of maybe £50 – £100 on £10,000 of foreign spend. I would be disappointed not to be able to shave that and more off a hotel booking every night.