Comment by neonstatic
10 hours ago
The provider is Wise - an "e-money" institution. I've been using them for well over a decade. They are very good. Never had any issues until recently - a service I was interested in uses Stripe to "verify" the card before charging. Stripe rejected all Wise cards - physical and digital. I had to use my legacy bank's debit card. Problem is, the legacy bank charges outrageous forex fees and has an awful spread on top of it, so if I can't use Wise card after "verification", I will have to give up on the service. I asked them what could be done and they just said they use Stripe and that's it.
Wait, why does your debit card involve forex fees and spreads?
Somebody's got to do the currency conversion. If you let the merchant do it, it's usually even worse.
(Implicit is the OP buying a bunch of stuff in a currency which is not the one they earn it; probably only one of those is dollars)
With Wise it does not, but with my legacy bank it does, because the base currency is one of the non-euro European ones.