The rate was set by whoever was holding the last screen

None of these four lost the money at the moment they paid. Every one of them found it afterwards, in a statement, in a reconciliation, or in a total that did not match the number on the screen.

Money & World asked people who move money across borders for one practical lesson from doing it. The useful answers came from four countries and four unrelated occupations, and they describe the same mechanism from four angles. At some point in the chain somebody other than the payer chose the exchange rate, took a margin inside it rather than as a fee, and was under no obligation to say how much.

That is a different problem from a bank charge, and it is worse in one specific way. A fee has a number next to it. A margin buried in a rate does not, so there is nothing to compare and nothing to refuse.

The markup was on the screen, and declining it was the whole trick

Answer: Meredith Thomas withdraws cash abroad full time. Her rule is to decline the cash machine offer to convert, which sends the transaction to her own bank at its rate instead. In Montenegro she found the machine had built a ten percent markup into the rate it offered.

Meredith Thomas, owner and travel writer at Two Packs And A Pup, has travelled full time with her spouse and dog for more than two years and handles the household and business accounts.

"When withdrawing cash from a foreign ATM, ALWAYS decline the conversion rate if you're given the option. This won't stop your transaction from processing, but instead allow your personal bank to set the exchange rate. This nearly always leads to a better conversion, as the ATM owner likes to bake in a poor exchange rate as a hidden fee."

In Montenegro, she says, the machine's own rate carried "a full 10% markup on the withdrawal cost".

The offer she is describing is dynamic currency conversion. The machine or the terminal proposes to bill you in your own currency, which sounds like a convenience and is in fact a price quote. Accepting it hands the conversion to the party that owns the terminal. Declining it sends the transaction across the card network to the bank that issued the card.

Her second habit is the one that makes the first one possible.

"I check our credit card charges daily. It's not because I'm worried about fraud, but rather because in comparison to when we lived in the states, charges in foreign countries often come through with unrecognizable vendor names."

Reconciliation is where a conversion loss becomes visible, and a foreign charge arrives stripped of the thing that would let you recognise it. A week later the line reads as a street address or a payment processor, and the memory that would price it is gone.

The invoice was converted twice before it landed

Answer: RHILLANE Ayoub was paid an invoice of 45,000 dirhams by a client in the United Arab Emirates. His Moroccan bank converted it through United States dollars into Moroccan dirhams, taking a margin at each step. He reports losing close to 380 dollars and noticing three weeks later while reconciling.

RHILLANE Ayoub runs RHILLANE Marketing Digital, an agency working out of Tangier with clients in Morocco, the Emirates and California.

"My bank converted AED to USD to MAD in one automatic step and applied its own exchange margin at each hop. I lost close to $380 on that single transfer and didn't even notice until I reconciled the books three weeks later."

The routing is the whole story. Nobody quoted him a bad rate. The money took a path with two conversions in it because that is how the correspondent chain between those two banks happens to work, and each conversion was priced by the institution performing it.

His remedy was to stop letting the arrival of money trigger the conversion.

"Clients now pay into an account that matches their currency, so there's no forced conversion on arrival. I only convert to dirhams when I actually need to pay salaries or local vendors here in Tangier, and I do it manually so I can see the real mid-market rate before I commit."

He puts the saving at roughly two to three percent per international invoice. That figure is his own and no public dataset holds it. What is checkable is the principle underneath it, which he states more usefully than the number does.

"Before any cross-border payment, personal or business, I check who controls the exchange rate at each step. If I can't answer that question, I don't send the money yet."

The prompt at the till is a price, not a courtesy

Answer: Runbo Li had a card frozen while he was in Asia and lost fourteen hours to the time difference before anyone at his bank could unlock it. He now holds three layers: a domestic account he leaves at home, a multi-currency account, and cash drawn on arrival. He puts terminal conversion at four to seven percent worse than the card network rate.

Runbo Li is co-founder and chief executive of Magic Hour, and was paying vendors in several countries while the company scaled.

"I was in Asia for a stretch, needed to pay a vendor urgently, and my bank flagged the transaction as fraud. Froze the card. No warning. Customer support was asleep because of the time zone difference. I lost 14 hours waiting to unlock my own money."

That is a failure of access rather than of price, and it belongs here because the two arrive together. The traveller who has one card and one route has a single point of failure in both senses. One party sets the rate, and one party can switch the money off.

On the conversion itself he is blunt about the mechanism Thomas describes from the other side of the world.

"The tip that saved me the most money over time: always pay in the local currency when a terminal asks. That 'pay in USD?' prompt is a trap. The conversion rate they offer is consistently 4-7% worse than what your card's network gives you."

Two people who have never met, one at a cash machine in Montenegro and one at a card terminal in Asia, independently name the same prompt as the place the money goes.

The drip that only shows up monthly

Answer: Silvia Lupone pays vendors and expenses for a rental property in Cozumel. Paying by conventional bank transfer, she says the combination of poor exchange rates and international transaction fees cost thousands of dollars each month before she moved to a multi-currency account.

Silvia Lupone owns Stingray Villa in Cozumel and pays Mexican vendors from an American position.

"In the beginning, I used old-school bank transfer methods to handle all the various expense payments and vendor payments related to our Cozumel rental property. It wasn't long before I realized there are hidden fees everywhere. Poor exchange rates and other assorted International Transaction Fees resulted in thousands of dollars lost each month. And it's just a constant drip drip of money."

Her figure is large, it is her own, and it is the kind of number that should carry a caution rather than a headline. What generalises is the shape she puts on it. A conversion margin does not present as a bill. It presents as a series of transfers that each look approximately right, which is why she describes finding it as a drip rather than as a shock.

Her advice to anyone leaving is procedural, and it matches Ayoub from the opposite end of the same transaction.

"When you use your credit card for meals, always choose to pay in Mexican Pesos rather than USD."

The one place American law makes somebody print the rate

Answer: The remittance rule requires a provider to disclose the exchange rate before the consumer pays, along with the transfer amount, fees, total and the amount the recipient will get. The same section then permits a statement that fees charged at the far end may leave the recipient with less than that total.

There is a document underneath all of this, and it does two things at once.

Under 12 CFR 1005.31, part of Regulation E, a remittance transfer provider must give the sender a pre-payment disclosure. The list is specific. The amount to be transferred, any fees and taxes the provider imposes, the total, and at paragraph (b)(1)(iv) the exchange rate used by the provider, rounded to no fewer than two and no more than four decimal places. Covered third-party fees appear as Other Fees, and the amount the recipient will get appears as Total to Recipient.

Read the next two items carefully, because they are the honest part.

Paragraph (b)(1)(vii) says Total to Recipient shall not include non-covered third-party fees or taxes collected by a person other than the provider. Paragraph (b)(1)(viii) then allows the provider to add a statement that such fees or taxes may apply and may result in the designated recipient receiving less than the amount disclosed as that total.

So the strongest disclosure in American consumer payments law names the rate, and in the same breath concedes that the number at the bottom is not a promise about what lands. Ayoub lost his margin to exactly the parties that sentence describes, at banks in the middle of a chain he never chose.

The rule is also narrower than it first looks. Under 12 CFR 1005.30 a sender is a consumer sending primarily for personal, family or household purposes, so a business invoice is outside it entirely. A provider that handled 500 or fewer transfers in each of the last two calendar years sits inside a safe harbour and is not covered. And none of it reaches the situation Thomas and Li describe, because a card tap or a cash withdrawal at a foreign terminal is not a remittance transfer.

Europe made the markup a number on the screen

Answer: Regulation (EU) 2021/1230 requires currency conversion charges on card-based transactions to be expressed as a percentage mark-up over the latest European Central Bank reference rate, disclosed before the payment is initiated, displayed at the cash machine or till, and published online.

The European Union answered the same question in the channel American law leaves open.

Article 4 of Regulation (EU) 2021/1230 requires payment service providers and anyone offering currency conversion at a cash machine or a point of sale to express the total currency conversion charges as a percentage mark-up over the latest available euro foreign exchange reference rates issued by the European Central Bank, and to disclose that mark-up to the payer before the payment transaction is initiated. The same article requires the party at the terminal to display it there, to tell the payer they may instead pay in the currency the payee uses and let their own bank convert, and to make the information available afterwards on a durable medium. Recital 10 gives the reason in one line, which is comparability. Every provider has to state the cost the same way.

The limits matter as much as the rule. It binds providers in the Union and it is written around Union currencies. Montenegro, where Thomas found her ten percent, uses the euro without being a member state. Morocco, Mexico and the Asian terminal Li describes are all outside it. What the regulation demonstrates is not that the problem is solved. It demonstrates that the number can be produced on demand, because a large market has required it and the terminals print it.

What the four have in common

Answer: None of them was overcharged in a way they could see. In each case a second party owned the conversion, priced it inside the rate, and the payer discovered it later. Each remedy is the same shape, which is taking back control of when and by whom the money is converted.

The four have almost nothing else in common. A travel writer, an agency owner in Tangier, a software founder, a guest house owner in Cozumel.

• Thomas declines the terminal offer, which moves the conversion to her own issuer.
• Ayoub receives in the client currency and converts manually when he needs local money.
• Li holds a domestic account, a multi-currency account and local cash, and pays in the local currency at every terminal.
• Lupone moved off bank wires to a multi-currency account and pays vendors from the matching balance.

Each of them bought the same thing, which is the right to choose the moment of conversion, and each pays for it in administration. Thomas checks charges daily. Ayoub converts by hand. Li maintains three layers where one would do. Lupone runs balances in two currencies.

The other shared feature is the detection lag. Three weeks for Ayoub, a monthly pattern for Lupone, and for Thomas a habit built specifically because a foreign charge arrives without a recognisable name on it. Nobody in this group caught the cost at the counter. The disclosure rules above are aimed at exactly that gap, and only one of them reaches a card terminal.

What this does not prove

Four accounts are four accounts. This is not a survey of what cross-border payments cost, and none of the figures here can be checked by a reader.

The ten percent in Montenegro, the 380 dollars into Tangier, the four to seven percent at the terminal and the thousands a month in Cozumel are each a person describing their own transaction. No public dataset holds any of them. They are attributed for that reason. The Cozumel figure in particular is a monthly loss on a single small property, which is a large claim, and it is presented as her statement rather than as a measurement.

The documents are evidence about the rules and nothing more. The remittance rule shows what American law requires of a remittance transfer provider and what it explicitly does not guarantee about the amount that arrives. The European regulation shows what a mark-up disclosure looks like where one is mandated. Neither tells you what any particular cash machine charged anybody, and neither applies to the four transactions described above.

The gap we could not close is the obvious one. There is no public series of what dynamic currency conversion actually costs at the point of sale, by country or by operator, because the party setting the rate is the party that would have to report it. Nobody publishes the mark-up on the screen at an airport cash machine. If you are shown an average, ask where the sample came from.