How to avoid currency conversion charges when using my Skrill Prepaid Mastercard®?
The Skrill Prepaid Mastercard® is available only to residents of authorized European Economic Area (EEA) countries and the UK.
As of November 2019, we started issuing physical Skrill Cards in EUR currency only. This doesn’t mean that you will be charged for currency conversion when you use the card in your home country. On the contrary, we’ve made it possible for you to easily avoid currency conversion charges.
How?
Even though your Skrill Card currency is technically EUR, we won’t charge you for currency conversion when you make purchases or withdraw cash in your Skrill account currency. For example, if your Skrill account is in GBP, you will not pay for currency conversion when you spend funds in GBP.
What is DCC and how to avoid it?
Please note that merchant (POS) terminals and ATM operators will detect the currency of your card and may offer to process your payment in your native card currency (EUR) – this process is called dynamic currency conversion (DCC). This might sound appealing, but we advise you to be cautious. Here’s how operators normally offer this:
Accepting conversion may result in high FX charges - if you agree to DCC, the terminal/ATM will use their own FX rate, add up an FX conversion fee and FX markup of up to 18% on top of the exchange rate. Later, when we receive the debit request from the merchant, it will come in EUR and we won’t know that you actually made the transaction in another currency. Converting this amount back to your wallet currency will incur additional conversion charges.
Even if your transaction currency does not match your Skrill account currency (when you travel abroad, for example), we recommend that you carefully consider the suggested DCC, as Skrill typically offers you better FX conversion rates and a smaller currency conversion fee (3.99%).