I have been recently testing radicant in North Macedonia. I was curious how it’s gonna work with such a niche currency as Macedonian denars. And tbh - I have mixed feelings.
Initially, it looked pretty promising - here’s a transaction from 10.09:
and here’s the rate from the Visa calculator - it’s pretty the same amount:
But… when the transaction changed its status to “completed” after a few days - CHF 30.34 changed into CHF 30.53:
so it’s more than 0.60% above the initially booked amount / the amount in the Visa calculator. Of course - it’s still not a big deal, but it’s significantly higher than 0.1% calculated by Moneyland.
I wanted to understand the reason behind this, so I contacted radicant support, but their answer was quite vague:
Well, when we take the FX rate from 11.09 - the final amount should be… lower, not higher:
In that case - the actual markup is even higher: ~0.77%.
When I used Neon, before they introduced currency conversion fees for free accounts, final amounts matched the Mastercard calculator. So it’s a bit disappointing radicant is less transparent and it’s hard to understand what’s the actual source of FX rate they use.
PS Another annoying thing I noticed during the trip was that radicant messes up the order of transactions. They are not sorted by transaction time, but by booking time, which makes it difficult to keep track of transactions for a given day as they are in a completely random order.