Our team looked at the cost of exchanging currencies with 2 popular high street banks in IE (Bank of Ireland, and Allied Irish Banks) between 28 May 2024 and 31 May 2024. We found that using Revolut to exchange money is on average up to 10 times cheaper (and in reality, sometimes even more) when exchanging 1,000 EUR to 5 other currencies.

The data for the research was collected between 28 May 2024 and 31 May 2024, using various data sources including: the currency exchange rates available publicly on the websites of the banks listed, currency exchange calculators (also provided via those banks' websites), and where neither of these were available, customer accounts which we used to simulate a currency exchange. We calculated the “cost to exchange” 1,000 EUR to GBP, USD, CHF, AUD, and SEK using each of the other providers. The “cost to exchange” includes any taxes, fees or commissions applied by the provider, in addition to what we'll call their “currency exchange markup”. The “currency exchange markup” is the amount added to the mid-market rate by each provider when completing an exchange. Ideally, a buyer would exchange money at the mid-market rate, which is the midpoint between the buy and sell prices of any two currencies. This is the best scenario because providers usually have different buy and sell prices, and the further they are from the mid-market rate, the less money the buyer gets from the exchange. We then compared the average of the other providers’ “cost to exchange” 1,000 EUR to GBP, USD, CHF, AUD, and SEK with our own. We should note that the data was collected on weekdays. During this period, no additional fees apply to our exchanges as long as customers are within their plan’s fair usage limit. On weekends a 1% fee applies, regardless of a customer’s plan.

On average Revolut was 13x cheaper when exchanging 1,000 EUR to GBP, USD, CHF, AUD, and SEK on weekdays. By quoting ‘up to 5x cheaper’, we can be confident that this remains true, even when rates fluctuate.