Filed Rate, Cleared Rate: A Fee Audit of Three Travel Cards
A working comparison of Wise, Revolut, and a standard bank card, logged against what each one actually promised before takeoff.
Three cards, one wallet, and a filed rate for each of them. That's the paperwork before any of this starts: what a provider says a transaction will cost, logged against what actually clears. Everything below is sorted the way I'd sort a runway incident, time, event, outcome, no drama attached to any of it.
The Weekend Markup Nobody Announces Over the Tannoy
Saturday, 1147, taxi rank, card tapped against the reader for a fare that would have cost the same in any currency on a Tuesday. It didn't. Revolut Standard flags an extra FX markup of up to 1% on any conversion processed on a weekend, on top of whatever rate applies during the week, and it applies whether or not you're still inside your monthly fee-free allowance. Filed rate: whatever the interbank mid-market number was reading Saturday morning. Cleared rate: that number plus a weekend loading with no separate line item announcing it.
Wise doesn't run this schedule at all. Its conversion fee sits between roughly 0.35% and 0.41% on major currencies, climbing to about 2.85% on the exotic end, applied on top of the mid-market rate rather than baked into a marked-up one, and it holds steady regardless of what day the card gets tapped. Same fare, same card, Monday or Saturday, same fee. That's the whole finding for this section: one provider's rate has a calendar attached to it and doesn't say so upfront, the other one doesn't have a calendar at all.
Weekend markup, filed vs cleared
Check the day before you tap, not after.
A Friday-night conversion that settles Saturday still counts as weekend on some issuers.
The paid Revolut tiers remove the markup but add a monthly fee of their own; work the arithmetic before upgrading.
A weekend fare cleared with a 1% markup where a 0% day rate was filed. No injuries, one extra line on the statement.
— Naledi Khumalo
The ATM Screen That Asks You a Trick Question
0906, ATM, three machines in a row, one screen asking whether I'd like to withdraw in home currency or local currency. That's Dynamic Currency Conversion showing up for its shift. Say yes to home currency and the withdrawal routes through the ATM operator's own exchange rate rather than your card issuer's, typically several percent worse than the mid-market number, stacked on top of whatever your card already charges. The standing instruction, filed and re-filed every time: decline it, take the local currency.
Declined the DCC, took local currency, and the rest of the transaction ran against each card's own published terms. Wise, since the 1 May 2026 UK scheme change, gives a flat £250 a month in fee-free ATM withdrawals, then charges 2.69% on anything above that, no fixed fee per withdrawal. Revolut Standard allows five withdrawals or £200 a month, whichever limit arrives first, then charges 2% past it. A traditional bank card with no travel features, the kind most people are still carrying as a backup, charges a flat 2.5% to 3% foreign transaction fee on the withdrawal itself, and that's before the ATM operator adds its own flat surcharge on top, commonly a few dollars or pounds regardless of amount withdrawn.
Same £200 ATM withdrawal, three cards, DCC declined
The one instruction that actually matters at the machine
When the screen offers a choice of currency for the withdrawal, choose the local one every time. The home-currency option is the DCC provider's rate, not your card issuer's, and it's filed to look like a convenience.
Reconciling the App Against What Was Actually Filed
2210, hotel room, banking app open, three days of transactions logged against three days of memory of what each one should have cost. This is the actual audit, not the withdrawal itself. A taxi fare that should have converted at the weekday rate showed the extra Revolut weekend loading because it cleared two days after the tap, not on the day of it, settlement lag doing what settlement lag does. An ATM withdrawal that looked clean on the receipt carried a flat operator surcharge that never appeared on screen at the machine, only in the app afterward.
Closing log
Ran on schedule against the filed terms in every case. The only delay was in reading them beforehand rather than after the statement landed.
Nothing on this trip was a scandal. Every fee traced back to a term that was published somewhere, Wise's tiered FX percentage, Revolut's weekend markup and monthly allowance, the bank card's flat 2.5-3%. The gap was never between what was legal and what wasn't. It was between what was filed in the terms and what a traveler actually reads before tapping a card against a reader at 1147 on a Saturday. Three cards audited, three sets of terms held, zero surprises that weren't already in writing somewhere I hadn't checked. ■
