Exchange rate compared between the 4 cards
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So, which card gives us a better deal. On 3rd Dec in Kuala Lumpur, we did a test, purchasing food or drinks with KLCC. We visited Cold Storage, Guardian. At the same period of time span of 1 hr at around 11am, the spot or interbank exchange rate registered on Yahoo Finance is 3.0553.
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Below is a electronic receipt generated by Revolut (in the app).
We bought a few other items from various stores that allows payment via VISA or Mastercard. Here are the results of the exchange rate being used. In this case, the higher the exchange rate means we pay lesser in SGD for item.
| Card | Exchange Rate (Spot Rate = 3.0553) |
| Revolut | 3.0537 |
| Transferwise | 3.0552 |
| YouTrip | 3.0386 |
| Crypto | 3.0474 |
Other than Crypto card, the other 3 cards all specify the exchange rate clearly in the app itself. Crypto just showed the charges in Ringgit and didn’t indicate the exchange rate. We derived the exchange rate of 3.0474 by checking the actual SGD deducted which came in the form of an email.
We noticed that both Revolut and Transferwise are very close to the spot rate. In fact, Transferwise is almost on the dot with just 1 pip difference. (3.0552 vs 3.0553).
Although Transferwise gets the better exchange rate, all transferwise transactions incur a fee. As our purchase amount was rather small, the fee was just 1 SGD cent. Thus if you were to include that into the formula, you will be getting a lower exchange rate to 3.0303.
If you are a weekend shopper, you ought to be aware of Revolt charges. According to their website,
At weekend (Friday 00:00 – Sunday 23:59) we apply a small mark up on the spot rate as the Forex markets are closed. We take the rate from Friday 00:00 and apply a 0.5% mark up on major currencies and 1.0% on other currencies to protect the company from potential losses due to a large fluctuation in the rate. For illiquid currencies Russian Ruble and Thai Baht, there is 1.5% mark up on weekend.
Imagine if we MYR on a weekend with SGD as the base currency and the spot rate was 3.0553, Revolut will charge you 1% and it will 3.0553 – 1% X 3.0553 = 3.0553 – 0.030553 = 3.0247