Anyone using Zen? Careful with their credit cards

While Zen, in general, is a great banking product, there is one expensive catch regarding the prepaid credit card they issue you.
And that is their exchange rate for credit card purchases or withdrawals. They actually change their exchanges rates drastically for all purchases and withdrawals from ATM between weekdays and Saturday/Sunday (based on CET timezone).
And the bad part is that the weekend exchange rate is around 40% (!!!) worse than the exchange rate you get during the week.

I have never, ever had a credit card company do that. I contacted their support and was told "well, this is our company policy - it is what it is" :eyebrow:

Anyone experienced something similar?

That is interesting policy. Strange such a big swing.

Rick
Universal4

Quote:

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Fee outside foreign exchangemarket hoursAdditional 0.4% in rates

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Maybe a programming error? 40% = 0.4 (but not 0.4%)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Sherlock

Maybe a programming error? 40% = 0.4 (but not 0.4%)

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No, but that is what I thought first too. Their support actually confirmed that they change the exchange rates over the weekend.
I am currently in Kenya, max withdrawal from ATM is KSh 40000, and on weekday, Zen charges my € account with €265 for that, and two days later on a Saturday they charge me with €345 (official exchange rate fluctuation was insignificant). Hmm, that is actually "only" 30% more... sorry. Same when I use the credit card to pay in a shop on weekends.
Still a interesting way to **** over your customers, def don't want to use that card to make any larger purchases during the weekend ...

This is interesting.

Anything in their terms about the actual numbers? Like weekdays are equal to x% over the actual exchange rate and weekends are equal to x% over the actual exchange rate, or maybe a % fee added to the amount on weekends/weekdays.

One would think they must have to spell it out a bit.

Rick
Universal4

The same weekend surcharge has revolut (about 1%), and this Zen looks like a Lithuanian copycat of Revolut.

I still think it is a programming error with some exotic currency - error of 2 decimals. Something like that happened to me in one Banana republic, where 1000 units is 1 USD, but they charged me like 100K or 10, I do not remember.

That, combined with some highly unmotivated part-time employee on CS....

No financial institution is that stupid. Only we affiliates are used to be robbed by 40% (or more), but it is still not normal.

Try to pay for something really cheap during weekend in EUR/GBP/USD area to see if thy rob you by 40% again.

Btw. they do not offer a credit card (I started to study this, because I desperately need a credit card, because in Latin America I can not buy a ticket or rent a car with my debit or prepaid cards).

By all indications it appears that Zen is something to stay away from. If they can't get this right, errors, support, etc what more could you expect.

So actually, after a lot of back and forth, I was able to convince their support to look into it, and it turned out that it had been a technical issue. And they did refund me the difference and fixed the problem.