Articles, analysis, and updates from Blackcat, grouped under Fees & Costs.
Explore categories
A search for the best card for travel to Europe will get you rankings, but a ranking doesn’t factor in your real route. Europe is not one currency zone, so the same card can be cheap for a week in Lisbon and expensive for a week in Kraków.
A card payment looks like a single instant action, but behind the tap there is an authorisation path, a set of EU security rules and a pricing structure that only becomes visible when a payment is declined, a hold is placed, or a purchase abroad is converted at a rate you did not expect.
Most euro payments run on a small number of shared systems. A transfer from Lisbon to Tallinn uses the same rails as one between two accounts in the same city, and the rules that govern it come from EU legislation rather than from any one provider. What differs between providers is the detail: what arrives free, how fast it arrives, and who is allowed to open an account in the first place.
You paid a supplier at 6:40pm on a Friday. On Monday they email to say nothing has arrived. Nothing went wrong – the payment went out on the standard rail, and the standard rail does not run at weekends.
You're saving toward something with a rough date attached – a wedding deposit, a house move, a career break – somewhere under a year out. In this scenario, an ad promising up to 3% annually on a 12-month fixed term deposit looks tempting.
Most of us choose a card for reasons that have nothing to do with how it performs: the colour, a headline cashback number, the word free. Or follow our friends' choice.