Question for Wise card users (Wise as in the Foreign exchange card company)y

I think that is exactly what I am doing with my peso balance.

You should be able to open a Swiss Franc balance and just convert some pounds or Euro to Swiss Franc, it would appear as a new balance just like my peso balance below.

(note: as usual I've edited names to make them less identifiable, Ana you know about Ren--- is the landlord)



Scroll Right on the Balance Row and then click the + to add a balance type.

When I spend in the Philippines the spending comes from my already converted peso balance, but the card machine does not know that my card has a peso balance so it will offer "let me do the currency conversion from pounds" which you really do not want to do I always say I am paying in peso please, you would do the same and say I am paying in Swiss Franc please.

It's not automatic you have to make the concious choice to pay in the currency you want when you present your card to the card machine.

By card machine I mean at the point of payment be it a shop or restaurant, and also at an ATM.

To add to what I posted, when you want to convert you just select your GBP balance or any other balance and choose convert then but I guess you've done that before, obviously it makes little sense to convert PHP back to pounds unless there has been a huge movement in favour of the peso because every conversion incurrs a fee but sometimes there are huge movements and it might make sense as you can get back more pounds than you originally converted, that's a bit like amateur FX speculation

One feature I just used for the first time with Wise the other day is the ability to select an auto-convert of pounds to your desired currency at a rate you desire to get.

The peso had been trading between around 70 to 71 to the pound but was hovering around 70.4 but I wanted to try to get at least 70.51 on £500 when the auto-convert triggered I in fact got 70.5438 to the pound, so I was quite pleased

Fees are going up just now probably because interest rates are high but Wise is still pretty much the best way to get foreign currency.

It's the interbank rate at the moment you do the purchase Mike, they make a small charge as well for themselves, for example on my £500 I was charged £2.59 but I got the international market rate at the moment I made the transaction.

At the moment you would get about 116.35 EUR to the pound and then a charge based on the amount you were converting.

Wise Fees & Pricing: Only Pay for What You Use

Scroll down on that link for £500 to EUR it would be about 0.43% or £2.15 just now, it was about half that last year.

Acutally I'm wrong in April last year the fee was about 0.38% for peso cost me 38 peso to send 10,000, so only a little bit lower last year not half.

So in the example of 500 GBP to EUR with Sainsbury's you would get 572.95 EUR and with wise you would get 581.75 EUR with a 2.50 EUR fee so in your hand (or rather card) 579.25 EUR.

Bear in mind that you can only get £200 in any currency from the ATM once a month before they start charging you for ATM withdrawals but the card itself is fee free to spend on and it's contactless.

You have to have the pounds already in the Wise account GBP balance to set up these auto-convert things, but say you had £1000 in the Wise GBP balance I'm sure you could set up 400 GBP -> CHF and another 400 GBP to EUR it would convert at your desired rate and leave you with a 200 GBP balance.

Don't think you will get anything better apart from using a fee free debit card, like the Nationwide FlexPlus or this new Chase Bank UK card.

I just ordered the Chase Bank numberless card last week they are FSCS protected and give you 1% cashback on everything you spend (with some exclusions like money transfers) I'm hoping the card arrives before I actually fly as I want to use it for ATM withdrawals to let me use both my FlexPlus card and this Chase card to get up to 40000 for just two ATM fees or 70,000 in one day with a few more ATM fees both allow £500 a day withdrawls.

Actually if you are using Wise to spend in restaurants and shops and the likes you would actually do better using a fee free debit card for all your spending as long as you make sure that you always pay in the local currency and don't let them do a conversion to GBP in the payment terminal.

I'm not keen on using my FlexPlus card for anything other than ATM transactions when I'm in the Phils, I use a fee free credit card for almost everything else but if the Chase card arrives in time I may well do most of my spending on that.

One thing in terms of reviewing the Chase account, the app is quite poor, slow and buggy, great when it works but screen refresh is poor after transactions and it quite often ends up with a spinning wait indicator and you have to exit and restart to see it refresh but it works with Google Pay and it works even before your card arrives, I'm quite happy with it already, it also has a Savings account area when they give you 3.3% per annum interest so you can keep your funds in the savings account and move them to the current account section as required.

This is the link to the Chase thing Home | Chase UK

edit: just a follow up the Chase card arrived today only 2.5 working days from when I ordered it last Friday, so I am a very happy man as this will result in far fewer trips to the 7/11 ATM machine the one which lets me get 20,000 in one transaction for just one ATM fee, we live very close to the 7/11 so I am only exposed to any risk or danger for the time taken to walk to and from the house 1/4 miles in each direction and my extrmemely tall sone usually accompanies me.

Wise: the international account | Money without borders

Mike you might want to think about that Chase account that I mention in other posts above, the reason I say that is that while Wise is the best way to get money from your own account into someone else's account i.e. remitance the way I do for the kids that use case justifies the small fees that they have but any fee free account that gives you the interbank rate when you spend abroad is postentially a better deal.

As I also mentioned above I have a FlexPlus account with the Nationwide but that has a £13 a month fee to get all the features including spending abroad with no fees and just the interbank FX rate, however for me that is justified because it gives me breakdown cover in the UK with the AA and good quality annual multitrip travel insurance and some additional insurances for mobile phones and so on, £13 pound a months is less than I would pay for those products separately and I get the fee free cash withdrawls in the Philippines as an extra.

Home | Chase UK
But this Chase thing has no fees there is no monthly fee for the account, it is a full current account FSCS protected it allows fee free ATM withdrawals while abroad without significant limits as far as I can tell and you can use it to pay for anything where they accept MasterCard while you are abroad but just remember to ask to pay in the local currency and not to let the payment terminal do the conversion.

Also you get 1% cashback on all your spending (not ATM withdrawals) for the first 12 months so if you spent for example £600 on holiday you would get £6 back, they also give you 5% interest on payment roundups although you would have to spend an awful lot to get much back on that I guess.

And as I mention in other posts above my card arrived in just a couple of working days, I applied in the wee small hours last Friday morning and got the card by midday on Tuesday.

Yes that's the other benefit of having additional accounts.

Personally I've never found anywhere abroad that didn't take Mastercard, back in the day when I had stupidly high credit limits totaling £50,000 most of the cards were Mastercard and only one of them was a Visa card but then again I am not well travelled so I might just have been lucky.

It's not FSCS protected yes that's correct, but currently I have more than 100,000 peso sitting already converted in my account for next week and when I arrive I'm only going to take about 13,500 from the ATM if the FX rate stays as good as it is, the rest of it is there mostly to send the kids school fees for the next year to their own bank accounts and will be withdrawn as cash from their local accounts before we visit the schools to re-enroll thus avoiding foreign card ATM fees, the money that's left after that will be the rest of their support money for the remainder of July after I come back and again I will transfer that to their own accounts.

Wise has been around for nearly 13 years and operates on the ring fenced funds method in order to operate as an e-money service in the UK, I'm fairly relaxed with the security of funds in their business. And we as a business have also been using them for international payments for many many years.

For me the reason I like having larger amounts in the account is that I can lock in an excahge rate that I want, early last week we were back in the 69.xx range but at the end of last week it was getting up to the 70.5 range and today it was over 70.6 a few minutes two of my recent buys have been over 70 and one on the 8th of June was 69.799 if I had waited I might ahve got 70.6 but I was happy to lock in the rates I got.

I am tempted by their recent offer of interest on GBP USD and EUR balances through Blackrock but I need to look into it a bit more, it could be useful to have funds gaining interest while waiting to be converted later in the month it means me commiting the kids support money a month or so early but holding in GBP until I get the rate I am after.