The Wise Card: Round-the-World Foreign Currency Options

To add to Derrick M’s comment below, I noticed that it looks like Wise cards issued in Canada cannot be used to withdraw cash locally. I got my Visa debit and am about to travel, but it looks like it won’t serve the sole purpose I got it for… . https://wise.com/help/articles/2935769/how-much-does-it-cost-to-withdraw-cash

**Japan, Singapore and Canada cardholders
If you got your debit card in Japan, Singapore or Canada you won’t be able to use it to make ATM withdrawals locally. But you’ll still be able to use your card to make payments locally and around the world, and withdraw from ATMs overseas.

Not exactly free to withdraw via ATM overseas either. At least not more than twice a month:

If your card was issued in Canada: You can take out money for free abroad twice a month — as long as the total amount is under the equivalent of 350 CAD. But after that, we’ll charge you the equivalent of 1.50 CAD per transaction. This is a fixed fee. If you take out over 350 CAD in one month, we’ll charge you 1.75% on top of that.

In terms of the $0.04 fee; that is the fee you will incur when you use say a Visa Debit Card from your bank to transfer the funds. The minimum is $30. Once you have transferred that amount, it will open up account numbers for the most commonly used currency such as Can$, US$, Euro and British pounds; all of them will be provided with all the details like a local bank account (routing number, BIC, IBAN, Sort Code, institute, transit number etc). So once the first transfer is through, what I did was link a Tangerine account using the bank details for Wise like a bank account. In fact, I recouped the cost thanks to 2 x micro transactions that Tangerine deposits. Once that’s setup, technically, transfers to the card is free via bank-to-bank but of course 2-3 days delay in transfer but with no additional fee. You could do similar setups with banks that allow bank-to-bank transfers such as EQ (?; not sure since I do not have an account).

But agreed, it is difficult to see other uses for this other than cash withdraw outside of Canada at local bank. I *think* should be useful for cash withdraws only; similar to that of Stack. Will have to test once international travel is more friendly at least for me.

Am struggling the understand the mechanism: if you convert your CAD to EUR in your Wise account then use your Wise account to pay in EUR, that applies to only your EUR balance in your account?

I use everforex.ca, they have been the cheapest and best for me to buy and transfer money

would never carry such a bright ugly green colour of a card so can’t even be bothered to try the wise card.
why would companies go out of their way to exclude people who care about aesthetics which is every youngish person. at least with wealthsimple i get a sleek un-embarrassing card to use in public.

Transferwise seems to change their rules every other month… I didn’t find them at all reliable and had overall negative experiences with them and it was a pain to get my money back. I’ll stick with the bank to bank transfers.

Maybe I’m missing something, but can someone explain what the value is of ‘holding’ FX on multi-currency cards like this, assuming you’re not a forex trader? I understand if you have foreign-sourced funds and don’t want to convert it to CAD, but if you’re just planning to use the card to travel why not just get a 0% FX card like HSBC or practically any US travel card and be done with it?