Land in Lisbon this August and pull out a UK debit card at the first café you find, and there's a decent chance you'll pay somewhere between 3% and 6% more for your coffee than the person paying with a fintech travel card next to you — not because the coffee costs more, but because your bank's exchange rate and its "non-sterling transaction fee" are quietly stacked on top of the bill. Multiple UK apps now promise to strip that markup out entirely. Not all of them actually do, and the gap between what's advertised and what actually lands on your statement is wider than the marketing suggests.
How the old-style markup actually works
A traditional high-street current account or credit card typically charges a non-sterling transaction fee of around 2.75% to 2.99% on top of whatever exchange rate Visa or Mastercard applies that day, and separately charges a flat ATM withdrawal fee abroad, often £1.50 to £5 per withdrawal regardless of the amount taken out. Layer those together on a week's spending abroad — meals, an ATM withdrawal or two, a hotel incidental — and the total drag can run to £20-£40 on an otherwise unremarkable holiday, money that never shows up as a single obvious line item because it's baked into hundreds of small transactions instead. Card providers rarely advertise this cost clearly, which is exactly why it survives: nobody notices a 3% hit on a £6 coffee, but the same 3% compounded across an entire holiday's spending is real money. Some providers, including several building societies and a handful of the older High Street banks, still don't disclose the non-sterling fee prominently on their app's transaction screen, showing only the converted sterling amount without breaking out how much of that figure is the fee itself. That opacity is deliberate rather than accidental — a bank earns meaningfully more from customers who never switch providers for travel spending than from the handful who do the maths and move to a fee-free alternative.
What Wise, Revolut, Monzo and Starling actually charge
Wise applies the real mid-market exchange rate — the same rate you'd see on Google — and charges a small, transparent conversion fee, typically somewhere around 0.4% to 0.7% depending on the currency pair, with no markup hidden inside the rate itself. Revolut offers fee-free currency conversion on its free tier up to a monthly limit, currently around £1,000 of exchanges before a roughly 1% fee kicks in on additional conversions, and removes that cap entirely on its paid tiers. Starling Bank, one of the more generous options for straightforward travel spending, charges no fees at all on card payments or ATM withdrawals abroad on its standard personal current account, applying the Mastercard exchange rate directly with nothing added on top. Monzo works similarly for its standard account, though it caps free ATM withdrawals abroad at £200 within any 30-day rolling period before a 3% charge applies to anything withdrawn beyond that. None of these figures are fixed forever — providers adjust fee structures periodically — so it's worth checking the current terms in-app before a trip rather than relying on what a comparison article told you six months ago. Multi-currency accounts add a further wrinkle worth understanding: Wise and Revolut both let you hold balances in dozens of currencies simultaneously, converting only when you actually spend or withdraw, which suits anyone paid in a foreign currency or splitting time between countries far better than a standard sterling-only current account ever could. If you only travel once or twice a year for a fortnight at a time, that multi-currency structure is mostly unnecessary complexity — a simple fee-free card that converts on the fly does the same job with less setup.
Here's the catch almost nobody checks before they travel.
Weekend and public holiday exchange rates on several of these apps carry a markup that doesn't apply on weekdays, because the underlying currency markets Wise and Revolut draw their real-time rates from are effectively closed outside standard trading hours, forcing the app to apply a small buffer to protect against rate swings when the market reopens. If you're converting a large sum — funding a holiday budget in one go rather than spending as you go — doing it on a weekday morning rather than a Saturday afternoon can measurably improve the rate you get, particularly on less commonly traded currencies.
What happens if your card gets lost or cloned abroad
Fintech apps generally handle a lost or stolen card faster than a traditional bank, since freezing and reissuing happens directly through the app rather than a phone call to a call centre that may not be open in your time zone. Revolut, Monzo, Starling and Wise all let you freeze a card instantly from the app the moment you notice it's missing, and unfreeze it just as fast if it turns up in a jacket pocket ten minutes later — a genuinely useful feature that traditional banks have been slower to match. If the card is genuinely lost or stolen rather than mislaid, ordering a replacement while abroad is where the experience diverges most: some fintech providers can courier a replacement card to a UK address only, leaving you without a physical card for the rest of the trip, while others support international delivery for an extra fee. Check this specific detail before you travel rather than after a card goes missing in a country where a two-week wait for a replacement genuinely matters. Keeping a second card from a different provider as backup — even a standard debit card you rarely use day to day — is a cheap insurance policy against being stranded without any way to pay.
ATM withdrawals are where the real savings show up
Card payments abroad have gotten cheap enough across most providers that the differences between them are now fairly marginal for day-to-day spending. ATM withdrawals are where the gap widens, because a traditional bank's flat withdrawal fee combined with a poor exchange rate can turn a €200 cash withdrawal into an effective cost of £15-£20 above the true value, while the same withdrawal through Starling or an unlimited Revolut plan costs nothing beyond whatever the local ATM operator itself charges. Watch for that local ATM operator fee specifically — some standalone cash machines in tourist-heavy areas, particularly in parts of Spain, Italy and Eastern Europe, charge their own withdrawal fee on top of anything your card provider charges, and that fee is set by the machine's owner, not your bank, so no UK fintech app can shield you from it. Choosing an ATM attached to a recognised local bank branch rather than a standalone tourist-area machine is the more reliable way to avoid that particular cost. Withdrawing larger amounts less frequently, rather than taking out small sums every day or two, also cuts down the number of times you're exposed to a flat operator fee — a single €150 withdrawal at the start of a trip usually costs less overall than three separate €50 withdrawals spread across the week, even accounting for the slightly higher risk of carrying more cash at once.
The dynamic currency conversion trap
When a card terminal or ATM abroad asks whether you'd like to be charged in pounds or the local currency, always choose the local currency. Accepting the pounds option — known as dynamic currency conversion — hands the exchange rate decision to the local merchant or ATM operator rather than your card provider, and that rate is reliably worse, sometimes by 5% or more, than what Wise, Revolut, Starling or Monzo would apply on the same transaction. This single choice, made correctly every time, often saves more money over a trip than picking the "best" fintech provider in the first place — no travel card fee structure survives being routed through a bad conversion rate at the point of sale.
What to check before your next trip
Confirm your provider's current ATM withdrawal limit and fee threshold before you travel, since several apps changed these terms within the past year and older comparison guides may already be out of date. Always decline dynamic currency conversion and pay in the local currency, every single time you're asked. And if you're travelling somewhere with a less commonly traded currency — Thai baht or Indonesian rupiah rather than euros or dollars — test a small transaction early in the trip to see the actual rate applied, rather than assuming your usual UK experience will translate exactly the same way once you're outside the eurozone or the dollar bloc. Finally, check that your chosen provider is genuinely FSCS-protected up to £85,000 rather than operating under the weaker e-money safeguarding rules — most mainstream UK current accounts qualify, but some app-based providers still operate as e-money institutions rather than full banks, which matters far more for where you keep your everyday balance than for a card you're only using abroad for a fortnight.