I just came across a website/service called "Revolut".

www.revolut.com

In essence they offer an account with an attached credit card.

The account has 3 currencies (as of now), EUR, GBP and USD. Apparently you can transfer any of the 3 currencies to your Revolut account, then FX these 3 currencies at interbank rate and hold your funds in above 3 currencies.

You can then spend those 3 currencies with the credit card, 1:1 without any fees, or transfer them to an account in the other currency.

Furthermore it's possible to use the credit card in quite a bunch of other currencies, but they're always converted when you spend. It's not possible to hold funds in those currencies (yet).

Not sure about anything as I just found out about them, but seems like a cool offer.

CHF missing as a holding currency is a bit of a blow. The only one I found so far.

Interesting idea, thanks. Do you know anything about Optimal Payments which apparently is the company behind it?

No idea whatsoever.

I just found them, and now transferred €5 to see if and how this works. I´m still slightly sceptical, but I did find some news coverage and apparently they raised a few millions starting capital. So I guess they're definitely not just a fraud. Everything else I´ll check out by testing from here.

OK thanks - will be interested to hear your feedback.

Isn't this more a debit card ?

I guess it's absolutely a debit card. Yes.

Funnily enough they provided me with the card details over the app instantly. No checks no nothing, the card is up and ready for usage. Strange.

Also managed to instantly top up the account via another credit card, which worked out on the spot.

Now I just don't have anything I want to buy right now, otherwise I´d try to use the card right away.

A pre-paid credit card.

But what they're doing is bold indeed... Offering interbank rate as the exchange rate, I'm defo signing up.

hmm. i'm also using these 4 currencies. my way so far has been to:

have a gbp and chf credit card.

for eur and usd, use cash.

i'd be interested in getting a usd card. for eur, i could live with remaining in cash.

I went as far as opening a EUR account in Switzerland with a debit card where I have to pay a fee every month and it includes a debit card linked directly to it. But the only thing that is free is withdrawing cash and wiring money into the account in EUR. Any other transaction attracts commission.

Also tried to open an account in Germany with an attached credit card but that got rejected presumably because I don't have any credit history in Germany.

If the model for these guys work, it would be great, but they need a lot of volume to generate any profit from fees generated by people using the card.

I'm sure they will up their fees eventually but worth a go for now.

I have a www.dkb.de - was that rejected?

Otherwise, maybe try www.number26.de. You need a German address, but it's in € and they don't check any credit history because it's strictly credit based.

The dkb is the one that got rejected indeed. Not sure why but I guess I was just unlucky or didn't earn enough!

I don't earn much, my DKB-account is usually sitting with an odd €100 ready to be spent whenever in the €-zone. I just feed the account more if I plan to spend more.

My wife opened one just to have her separate EUR-credit card. No problems whatsoever.

Strange!

Yeh it's strange but not that strange, having worked for a retail bank many years ago, these kind of things are usually automated and probably something in my file didn't meet their Criteria who knows. They of course wouldn't tell you why.

I rang them and got the usual response in these scenarios... "We don't have to tell you why". I looked online and the reasons for rejection could be one of many but mainly it's either the Credit Check had a low score or the income part for someone residing in Switzerland was too low.

Their loss really my commission will now go to Revolut and their card issuer "OPTIMAL PAYMENTS LIMITED"... it's also one less account to keep track of!

Do you know anything about these guys?

I mean, how reliable are they, and why can they open accounts without any checks? I wonder if I´ll actually receive the credit card in the mail as promised. I guess I´ll have to wait for roughly a week to find out.

More info on their Terms & Conditions. You're supposed to read them before you sign up

Link: https://revolut.com/terms

No info about them. But they say in the terms that they are regulated by the FCA in the UK. So if I could be bothered to check that what they say I would check the registration on the FCA website.

They could open an account with no checks because it's a pre-paid credit card which you can normally just get from any card issuer you just need to register it to your name nothing else is needed.

If you start transferring unusual amounts of money and spending more than £5000 a month they will start asking questions and ask you to provide more info, they might want to confirm your identity or ask for proof of source of funds.

It's all in their terms and conditions.

Just did a quick search on the FCA website:

https://register.fca.org.uk/ShPo_Fir...000000m4IWvAAM

Edit: Interesting that on the Passport Out section of the FCA website for the company with registration: 900015 that Switzerland is not listed as a country where they are authorised to provide financial services!!!!

Also interesting is that a previous name of the company is Neteller! Not sure if it's related to https://www.neteller.com/en.

What I don't understand from Revolut:

You can actually hold 3 currencies (EUR/GBP/USD), but pay in many currencies.

If you pay in any of the "many" currencies, to which of the "holding" currencies will amounts be converted? I didn't find any option to influence this.

Also, given you have to transfer your money to them prior to purchasing anything, what risk is their of them failing and your money vanishing, given I've never heard of Optimal Payments Ltd...?

It is related to them:

https://www.neteller.com/en/about

Interesting question, which they should easily be able to answer. They must have an algo to decide which of the currencies they use to fund the purchases in non EUR, USD or GBP transactions.

In any case it shouldn't matter that much as they use the interbank rate as the basis for conversions, so converting from EUR to CHF or GBP to CHF should yield the same result but of course it should be easily identifiable to the customer what the Algo is.

Interesting... So what you effectively have is an online wallet (with a 0% funding fee!) with a pre-paid credit card attached to it!