Originally Posted by
dewsburyborn
The only fair and consistent way of comparing is to use different cards at the same merchant at the same time, hoping that they will be processed and charged at the same time and appear on statements at the same time. This avoids daily rate variations.
To those of you who know about this stuff, given that several US transactions on the same day come in at a differing FX rate - is the rate determined by the money market rate at the exact time that the transaction hits your Amex account ?
Thanks
No it depends upon which fx bucket your transaction fills at AMEX (very simple example to follow)
Amex US and Amex UK will have some FX's booked based upon the authorisations that have been processed - note this is authorisations not transactions - a merchant may process a transaction have it authorised but not actually send the transaction in for payment until a few days later (also some preauthorisations will go into these buckets)
These are often spot deals (dealt two days prior) so looking at the FX rates i.e. on
www.xe.com only can give an indication of a rate that could potentially be applied to a CC transaction in two days time
What happens is that say there are five million dollars bought by AMEX uk - all the transactions that are processed up to 5$ will go against that FX rate, then say another 5$ against the next rate in line ...etc
And this is a simple transaction not counting commissions
Sorry the short version is that you will only ever get an indication of the rate that will be applied