Originally Posted by
JEFFJAGUAR
I checked out xe.com and those rates are higher than what they list as the "official" rate. Something seems fishy with those rates. Were those the rates that appeared on your credit card statement (US banks are required to show the rate being applied on each individual transaction).
According to xe.con, on 09 April 2014 the GBP/USD rate was 1.6750359320
On 11 April 2014, the rate was 1.6735449485
I don't know where visa is getting its information from.
I've done xe.com before. Seems like xe.com shows you a real "medium" price that is unrealistic when you convert one currency to another. Anywhere you buy another currency, you will lose something.
To my experience, the rates on Visa is so much better than banks. For example, in Feb I did some ATMs in Seoul just to find out how exchange rates work. I checked Visa, 10000 equals 58.16 rmb. Then I used my UnionPay debit card without foreign transaction fee, withdraw 10000 won, spent 58.58 rmb (so the UnionPay rate is 1% higher than Visa rate). The xe.com rate (Google rate is almost the same?) is 58.10. That's why I've been quite happy with the Visa rates.
If you go to a bank in China to get 10000 won, it would cost almost 59 rmb.
My questions lies why Visa used the posting date's rate, not the transaction date's rate. I figure using the transactions date's rate would be more justifiable, even though rates can always go both ways.
The statement hasn't been out, and Chase.com is not as clear as Discover.com where it give you all the details of a transaction in the "recent transaction" page, whereas with Chase you need to wait for the statement to see all of these. 15 more days to go.