Do you use your bank card to make payments at POS terminals or on websites within the European Economic Area?

What does this mean in practice?

When you use your bank card to make payments at POS terminals or on websites or withdraw cash at ATMs within the European Economic Area, you may find that you are offered a choice of currencies and modes of conversion.

You may be presented with two options:

1. You may opt for the currency of your bank account, in which case the merchant’s bank makes the conversion at its Dynamic Currency Conversion (DCC) rate (‘webshop’s or merchant’s rate’), and charges your account with the resulting amount;

What do you need to know about this option? 

• Before you make your choice of currency (conversion), the merchant (webshop) is required to acquaint you with the DCC charge by making it appear on the payment site,   
• The amount payable will appear in the currency of your bank account directly, but while this may be convenient, remember that it already includes the fee charged for the conversion by the merchant’s bank, 
• There may be a substantial difference between the DCC rate and the one offered by your own banker.   

2. Or you may opt for the amount expressed in the currency used by the webshop (merchant’s website), in which case the conversion is made at the rate of exchange offered by the issuer of your bank card (i.e. K&H Bank). The amount payable will be displayed in the currency used by the webshop (merchant) and will be converted by K&H Bank via the card company (i.e. VISA or Mastercard).

What do you need to know about this option?  

• The above-mentioned Regulation requires K&H to inform you, starting from April 2021, about the applicable currency-conversion charges (i.e. margins). We will, therefore, send you text-message (sms) notifications about such charges as applied by us upon the first relevant transaction in every month. 
• Our bank is required to show its currency-conversion margin expressed in percentage points as compared with the latest euro conversion rate offered by the European Central Bank.

When should you expect a text message (sms)?

Upon the first transaction in any month related to:

• an ATM cash withdrawal or 
• a card payment (including online payments)

made in a currency of the European Economic Area which is different from the currency of your account.

What will the text-message (sms) notification be about?

• It will contain an identification of the card used to make the transaction, and 
• The bank’s currency-conversion margin expressed in percentage points as compared with the latest euro conversion rate offered by the European Central Bank.

Please note that K&H Bank is not aware of the rate of conversion (if any) between the settlement currencies of the card company and the merchant’s bank, and therefore our notifications will not contain any such information. If you wish to find out about the total conversion margin for any transaction, please check the relevant card-company websites.

In addition to our notifications sent to you as above, you will be able to check the margins applied by us at any time by visiting the following webpage: https://www.kh.hu/web/eng/foreign-exchange.