Scotia Bank ATM - Vancouver, BC - Canada - Presidential Account
Looking for some insight into the "best" banks in Canada to use a foreign ATM card. Our recent vacation situation involved withdrawing $300 CAD from a Scotia Bank ATM using a Presidential Checking Account. Presidential offers that they do not charge the account holder any fees. So, for withdrawing $300 CAD, our statement showed:
1) Debit of $282.81 USD
2) Int'l Exchange Charge of $.57 USD
3) Int'l Exchange Charge of $2.25 USD
I'm assuming charges #2 & #3 were from Scotia Bank. If you add them up, they appear to be a 1% ATM use charge. That seems pretty steep (thought it'd be a set dollar amount). I only withdrew cash once, so I can't tell if the Scotia Bank ATM charge is $2.25 + 0.002% of transaction (seems unlikely) vs a straight 1% charge. I only now investigated and read that a bank that owns the ATM might charge a percentage fee instead of a set ATM use charge for foreign transactions. I suppose 1% is still better than most credit card fees of 2-3%. I'm just curious if anyone knows of "better" Canadian ATM's to use my Presidential account from - which charge just a standard ATM use fee vs a seeming percentage.
Take this as an FYI then if your account is not a member of Scotia Bank's partners and you attempt to withdraw cash.
TIA for any insight others may have on this situation. Since we live in WA state now, we plan to make numerous trips to Canada in the future.
For restaurant and grocery purchases on this trip, we used an AMEX and an MBNA card which had 3% cashback promos for restaurant and grocery purchases, so the charges should "even out." I'll be interested to see what type of exchange rate I received though. The ATM withdrawal seemed to be quite a good rate (wholesale exchange rate?).