Were there sufficient funds in CNY for the transaction, because it should’ve taken from there. Sounds like it couldn’t and went for the GBP Pot, which didn’t have enough money.
Let me know how you get on, interested to hear what happened here.
Yes， sufficient funds in CNY
That’s not good! I was a little worried about it not picking the right currency automatically, but it did with EUR no problem, even at an ATM.
1 Like
It’s likely the HSBC GMA Visa card has the X2X Service Code (replaced Electron). This means that that has to authorised 100% of the time and some card terminals/ATMs take a dislike.
I had a N&P ‘light’ Visa card back in the day for travelling. Worked fine in Europe, occasionally made tills crash in the US and really didn’t like it when they tried to swipe it in a US card terminal.
1 Like
I have no idea but this would tally up with (my) reality. Previous with Monzo, I had a 100pc acceptance rate abroad and had no reason to think it wouldn’t work.
But with this having a backup is absolutely essential (I know, should’ve had one and thankfully did) as there were a few times where I had to revert to either Algbra or my Premier Credit.
It’s worth saying, with the obvious exception of the ATM, Apple Pay worked each time the physical card did not.
I tried my card in a Tesco/RBS ATM over the weekend and got an options that I was not expecting - It was asking me to choose either the LINK and VISA application on the card.
Premier credit isn’t an idea spending replacement as it charges forex loading - so I very rarely use mine abroad.
Indeed - but I was in a restaurant and really didn’t want to spend time transferring money out of the global money and into algbra when the card was just there.
But I agree, I wouldn’t use it day to day abroad for this reason. Which is a shame because if they didn’t do FX fee’s I’d bin off Global money and use it
1 Like
Just to say I’ve just returned from Skiathos in Greece and the Global Money card worked flawlessly.
I can’t tell you what the difference was from earlier this year, maybe HSBC did some clever back end improvements.
1 Like
I used it in Florida back in April, not 1 issue. Definitely would use again.
2 Likes
Looks like HSBC have now enabled push notifications for the Global Money account.
I did get three though. The GBP account conversion from GBP->USD. Then one for the USD account saying it had received the conversion to USD, then a final one for the USD spend.
Hopefully they’ll continue to improve but I like the direction it’s going.
Just wish they had CSV or OFX export.
I used it recently in the US and Canada. Didn’t preload in either local currency but whilst it always worked, it took a noticeable time to authorise.
I ended up using my Barclaycard more as it didn’t need preloaded at all (being a credit card) and didn’t have that noticeable delay.
Used mine recently in the Netherlands, for me it was very fast approval for transactions, including one of about €1600 where the euro balance wasn’t enough so the rest was converted instantly from my GBP account. I also used Zing! which was fine but inexplicably was declined for a couple of small transactions.
I’m just used to transactions going straight through with my main HSBC cards.
I would say that the delay (extra few seconds) was comparable to using a Curve card. Possibly some people wouldn’t even notice.