Revolutionary Mastercard

20th May, 2016. Posted by Mr Swagger

The worst thing about travelling has to be shopping around for the best currency exchange rate, and even when you find a good one you have to take several things into consideration.

• The fees that the bureau will charge you and how that will effect the rate that you thought you were buying
• The distance you may have to travel to get to the bureau, as most times the best places aren’t located on your local High St. I once bought Euro’s from a Dry Cleaners (Money laundering taken literally).
• If you have the time to get to or order the money before you travel as the worst rates tend to be at airports due to demand.

The fourth option is to just put it on your card and deal with your banks charges. The main issue with this is that most banks charge you per transaction and not for the period that you were travelling so you end up paying a lot more than if you had just bought your currency before travelling.

However there a few credit cards that allow you to spend abroad at a base rate with minimal transaction charges. The latest card to hit the market comes from London based Revolut.

Revolut is actually an app linked to a pre-paid MasterCard. The app allows customers to load money from their domestic bank account and use the card to spend their money in 90 currencies around the world at the interbank rate, which is the best exchange rate available with no fees. And no fees is what we we’ve all be striving for.

In it’s first 10 months of business Revolut has handled £342 Million worth of transactions, with a growth of 1500 new sign ups per day. Considering that Revolut is still considered a Start-Up this is all pretty astounding. And to further astound Revolut is now licensed by the FCA, that’s the Financial Conduct Authority to you and I.

Setting up Revolut is pretty simple. Once you have installed the app to your device you go through sign up procedure, which takes less than a minute to go through. You are then given the option order your Revolut card. With the card you have the option to have a physical card and a virtual one. Delivery of your physical card is around a week, which is much faster than any bank does for a standard card.

Once installed and card ordered you can [retty much use the app as you would a normal bank card. Transfering funds by registering a card (this can be done by taking a picture of your card or using NFC and then confirming card details), transfer funds to accounts other than your own and of course topping up and making payments.

Let the revolution begin.

The App is available from both The App Store and Google Play.

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