Well it may have something to do with the relatively low awareness that DCC is a scam.

By condoning non-compliant DCC, V/MC figured having one more merchant who can advertise V/MC acceptance outweighs to a hundred cardholders outweighs the cost of dealing with the one who complains, even if he tries to spread awareness of the DCC scam.

Regarding your last paragraph, we went through a discussion of this and I don't want to kidnap the thread but...although I know several states despite the legislation allowing surcharges on cc's had or still have prohibitions on surcharges, the one in NY was thrown out as a violation of freedom of speech (I finally read the decision and to me it's still a stretch; basically the judge said there really is no difference between a surcharge and a discount for cash so why should a merchant be prohibited from a surcharge when he or she can charge extra simply by calling it a cash discount). But the question is this; does any state, even the ones which prohibit surcharges, enforce the reg against gasoline retailers and do anything about their surcharges hidden as cash discounts? Apologies but I don't see any analogy to dcc.

Yep~ I think moondog (or maybe another one of us) has pointed out this before, but which date should we use to get Chase exchange rate, and on visaeurope or visa?

I remember it is 9am EST that Chase uses for getting its exchange rate. So presumably, we need to use http://usa.visa.com/personal/card-be...calculator.jsp and set the date to the posting date shown on Chase.com? This time difference stuff is making me crazy...

Also, how to determine the rate if transactions are posted during the weekend? Should we use the Friday rate or Monday rate, or weekends have rate as well?

You've got to remember how extortinate fuel is in many European countries though, most people don't even carry the the £80 or £90 (135 and 155 USD respectively) to fill up their car (I'm lucky if thats enough to fill up my car as Diesel is even more expensive!)! So I don't think paying cash for fuel would catch on! Its not like in the US where you can hand the cashier 40 or 50 dollars and it'll almost fill up a sedan. + A lot of people use cash back credit cards (the Santander 123 World MasterCard and American Express Platinum Cashback card is very popular in the UK), where you get 3% to 5% back on petrol anyway, so you'd still be breaking even. (+ The fact its illegal to charge extra to charge a credit card price for petrol in many EU member states, so its not really an issue).

There are some of those types of cards here, but not everybody has them.

My point is that just like in some cases such as New Jersey where I see more people handing cash over to the attendants because cash = cheaper, I think that if DCC becomes ubiquitous that DCC combined with FTFs will cause many people to avoid using their cards overseas because they'll know cash = cheaper v. credit card = 3-7% higher price. This is exactly the opposite of what Visa/MC want.

If I remember reading correctly, Visa doesn't update the exchange rate over the weekend and on a number of holidays. But for Chase cards you would look to see what the Visa exchange rate is on the posting date for the transaction. Pay no attention to local time or time zones. The only thing that matters is the posting date. So if the transaction posts on July 28th, you would look at the Visa rate for July 28th. I can't speak for other card issuers, but for Chase it's pretty straightforward.

But you've got visa.com and visaeurope.com and they all have the exchange rate information. That's what gets me confused.

I don't know which time zone you are in right now, but if you are in EST 9pm and go to visa.com, you see the latest available date to choose is today. If you go to visaeurope.com, the latest date is tomorrow already.

Therefore, Jul 28th EST might be different from Jul 28th UTC. That's my concern.

Can I assume since Chase is US-based, we can ignore visaeurope.com?

I am not saying anybody is wrong but I'm not completely sold on a couple of things bdeing said here but then again I am not sure. For example, I might make two different charges on the same day with the same card say in London; yet the exchange rates listed on those credit cards which show the exchange rate being used are slightly different. (Not dividing the GBP amount by the USD amount as that is rounded off to the nearest penny and might lead to differences in the third or fourth decimal places). I have always subscribed that to the constant changes during the day of international exchange rates. So for what other reason might the exchange rates be different.

As far as when the conversion is made, I was and still am under the impression the exchange occurs when the charge enters the international visa (or mastercard) network and arrives say at Chase if tghey're the issuer already converted with the 1% markup and then it's up to Chase to decide whether to eat it, pass it along or add 2%. Or perhaps Chase notifies visa inh advance what they wish to do and visa adds on the 1% or 3% as the case may be.

In no way am I saying I know this stuff is true, but that is what I have been led to believe.

To my knowledge, NY is the only state where the courts have thrown out the distinction between a surcharge and a discount. In the rest of the country, there is still a legal distinction and discounts are always lawful. As long as the gasoline retailers portray it as a cash discount rather than a surcharge, it would not be illegal in any state.

I never get Visa rate exactly, but the difference is very insignificant (less than 0.1% either way)

It really depends on the acquirer:
- I used two Visa cards overseas, one issued by two different HK banks, within minutes of each other in same merchant, with same posting date <-- same rate
- I used one Visa card overseas throughout a day in same city. Some transactions were posted on the same day, some on another day. But even the same-card same-day transactions have slightly different rates (one being noticeably different from the others).

So I think the acquirer determines what Visa rate we get, by controlling the time of posting.

And you won't get exact rate either because even if you are in the same timezone as the Visa website, the Thai/Chilean/Australian acquirer isn't.

What I observed is that my two Chase Visa cards (Sapphire Preferred and United Club) will bring slightly different rates even if two transactions are made almost simultaneously, one on each card.

And almost always, United Club card has slightly higher rate (about 0.1% to 0.2%), while Sapphire Preferred usually stick to the rates posted on Visa.com.

I will post some of the transactions here later when I have the time to dig through the statements.

@percysmith: Can I assume, based on your idea, that even though acquirers have control over the posting date, the rate used is still according to Visa/MC (on that day)?

I'm on ET, but the time zone doesn't matter. What matters is the date the transaction posts. It seems to happen at different times depending on the particular Chase card. For instance, CSP updates around 11pm ET with new posted transactions on every day except Saturday. I've noticed this behavior with other Chase cards as well.

I've always used the Visa US rate and have been able to reconcile the posted transaction amount exactly by using the exchange rate for the date the transaction posted. For example:

Date of Transaction
06/06 NANDOS WORLD SQUARE SYDNEY 42.12The posting date was 6/8, so looking at the Visa USA exchange rate on June 8th:

Doing the calculation:

45.00 AUD x 0.936106 USD/AUD = 42.12 USD

There is a slight discrepancy between the Chase rate of 0.936000000 and the Visa rate of 0.936106, but I've never had it impact the calculation of the posted transaction amount.

I think you might be onto something here. I had two transactions both on June 7th according to Chase that posted on June 10th. The earlier one from the afternoon had an exchange rate of AUD:USD of 0.936740262. The later one from dinner had a rate of 0.936742934. The Visa rate for June 10th was 0.936706. In neither case do I get a different result by using the Visa exchange rate, so I think at least for Chase cards it's easy to tell exactly how much the transaction would have been had you used the Visa exchange rate if you get hit with DCC.

Maybe the slightly higher rate I saw on the Club card won't bring the total up either. Thanks for explaining this~

Sydney has Nandos? Nandos the chicken restaurant? My wife loved this in London! We are going to Sydney soon.

Nando's is all over Australia. You should have no problem finding one. The only locations in the US are around DC, so they're not much use if you're on the west coast.

I still can't explain the slight discrepancy in between the listed exchange rates and the official Visa rate unless it's some instantaneous rate that the acquirer pulls from Visa?