Revolut, how to travel without thinking about your money?
When living abroad or travelling in other countries, managing money is always a problem : you either need a bank account in the foreign country, or you need to bring cash, but anyway you’ll pay high exchange fees. Sending money to or from your country is a daily pain which you need to undergo but would love to get rid of, right?
Here comes Revolut to make your life easier! Revolut is one of this new FinTech companies which helps you to better manage your money and simplify your banking processes. Launched in 2015, Revolut concentrates its efforts on making your life as a traveller easier.
I come from France and currently live in South Korea. Sending money here would be a real pain without Revolut: the exchange fees are high, opening an account takes time and is not easy if you don’t speak Korean, and if you own a Visa card, you simply cannot use most ATMs here.
Revolut offer a solution to these problems : when creating a free account on their application, you can order a Revolut MasterCard, which allows you to pay in any currency without paying any exchange fees nor any account management fees.
How do they do that? When you pay with their card, they pay the local debtor directly using the local currency. Internally, they use the interbank exchange market to transfer the money from your account (in my case, an euro account) to the receiver. Therefore, you can pay with the Revolut card as you would do it in your home country, without thinking about any fees, even for a small transaction like 3000￦ (a bit more than 2€).
But contrary to one might think, Revolut is not only a wallet you can use to pay abroad. Indeed, your accounts are real accounts with attached IBAN that allow you to receive money from anyone you want: yourself from another bank, a friend or even your employer that can pay your salary directly on Revolut.
Revolut being specialized in international transfers, it allows you to send money and own an account for more than 25 different currencies. With the card, you can pay in more than 100 different currencies.
The applications also offer you a clear and detailed list of your expenses, sorted by type, country or currency. Your Revolut card is also easy to manage through the application: you can enable the various security in one tap or order a new card in seconds. If you need to pay online, you can also create virtual cards which avoid you from sending your real card info online.
However, as of today, Revolut is not fully convenient for people living in South Korea: you don’t have a dedicated account available and taking cash at ATM costs you 3600￦ for each withdraw, which quickly costs you a lot.
Compared to its FinTech competitor N26, Revolut offers less services as a bank : credits and real insurances for travellers are not yet available. Having to enter my 3D Secure code (and therefore receive an SMS on my French number) every time I want to top-up using my French card is neither really convenient…
But giving how fast Revolut is evolving (they added support of almost 20 new currencies and accounts in less than 6 months, insurances for mobile phones, and announced much more for the coming months), I can see only a better future for us, customers and travellers!
So, if you plan to travel around the globe soon, give it a try and discover the other features offered by Revolut! It’ll quickly become your first choice to manage your money abroad and you will never have to think again to these expensive exchange fees! Is not Tech beautiful today?
Images in this article come from Revolut website or Twitter/Facebook pages.
