The best banks and cards for European travellers

Rules for inclusion:

I’ve focused on pan-european and multi-country offers first (list is growing every year). There is a decent option for every EEA resident available here.

Offers limited to residents of a single country (scroll down to see table) must offer at least as good terms as Bitwala or BNC10. That means a prepaid/debit card with 0 conversion fees and at least a few free withdrawals a month.

Credit cards are still mostly local only. They should at least offer 0 or very low conversion fees.

Eligibility usually concerns residence, not citizenship.

Recommendations:

Unless there’s an even better option for your country on the list above or below, get Bitwala or BNC10, depending on which you are eligible for and which suits you better. Both are free and you cannot go wrong with that. Ferratum has halted acceptance of new customers as of 2020.

If the included travel insurance justifies the price for you N26 You is great as well.

Credit cards: If there isn’t one listed for your country or you don’t qualify for one, get the new Bunq Travel Card instead. It gets accepted by merchants as a credit card (has the label and code) but has no line of credit. To use it, you simply top it up like a prepaid card. But remember, you only truly need to use a credit card when renting a car or similar (depending on country), for most other purposes a debit card is just fine.

Watch out: There are some banks that hide their currency conversion fee behind the fact that they use their own exchange rates instead of those from Visa or Mastercard. This way they can claim there are “zero” conversion fees, but then use exchange rates that are worse than the card companies’ and pocket the difference. The fine print should reveal this, but it’s a pain.

For some European countries not using the Euro there’s an additional wrinkle: There can be double conversions. You spend in say Indian Rupees, Mastercard converts to Euro and your bank then converts from € to your local currency with their own exchange rate. That’s how they can still have their cut. Seems to happen more with Mastercard than Visa. Here’s a good explainer how it works with Polish banks. Again, the fine print should reveal this.

Now, Revolut, Curve and Transferwise do not use Visa or Mastercard rates either, but at least they are transparent in that they use the mid-market rate. But still, with Revolut and Curve you’re up to 2% worse off on weekends, and with Transferwise in any case. 99% of the time you’re better off with the card companies’ rates and you won’t have to compare rates and what not.