Originally Posted by Adraco

Both VISA and MasterCard have a currency conversion fee of around 1.5% - 2.0%. They do this to protect themselves from ever losing any money on any one currency conversion.

So the full currency risk is always carried by the customer. By adding a small charge, like 1.5% or 2%, they effectively make it impossible to find market imperfections and play any type of arbitrage game on their expense. This is a system which applies to ALL their cards and all their services. There is no such thing as a flat fee for currency conversion, it's always percentage based to make sure that you can not play arbitrage games with them.

I do not have Paxum, and haven't read up on their specifics, but I find it highly unlikely that they would be able to talk MaterCard into carrying the currency conversion risk, that just won't happen. Any other claims are just uneducated until proofs are rendered.

The currency conversion fee is just another way of making sure to always ding the customer for as much money as possible.