My family recently took a vacation, where we spent roughly 4 weeks in the UK (England, Wales, Scotland) and a week in Paris. I live in New Zealand, and my "native" currency is the New Zealand Dollar.
Before we left, I'd heard about Wise and their currency card via various YouTube creators promoting it, and other things like it. It's easy to see from the various websites that Wise charges a 0.3% currency conversion fee, whereas overseas purchases made on my ASB Bank Visa Card incur a 2.1% offshore service margin. Buying a Wise card costs $14 NZD, and I remember doing some very rough maths at the time, which told me that if we spent more than (I think) $600 NZD on the Wise card, we'd come out ahead.
Aside: Why Wise and not an alternative like Travelex or Cash Passport? It was quickly apparent that Wise had the best rates, and it was well reviewed in blog posts and articles that compared them. Cash Passport in particular, seems ridiculous, with it's 5.95% currency conversion fee. That's nearly 3x what my bank Visa charges, why would anyone buy one of these things?
So, I signed up for Wise, bought the card, and off we went.
But how did it turn out in reality? Now that we're back at home, I've sampled some data from my bank and Wise statements to find out.
Overall
For every $1000 NZD I spent with Wise, I lost $2.99 NZD to currency conversion fees
For every $1000 NZD I spent on my ASB Visa, I lost $13.7 NZD to a combination of fees and worse exchange rate.
If you're spending more than $1300 NZD, then (compared to an ASB Visa like mine) the Wise card pays for itself. The more you spend, the more you benefit, but in the grand scheme of things it wasn't that big of a deal.
I'm glad I got (and used) the wise card. It did save us some money, and their mobile app and web systems are really nice, but there were also some annoyances. These prevented us from using it as much as we might have liked and were a bit disruptive sometimes when making purchases.
Experience
The main way of managing Wise is via their Mobile App. I used the iPhone app, which was fantastic. It's really well designed, highly polished and easy to use. It makes the ASB (and probably most other banks) mobile applications look like outdated dinosaurs.
To load money onto your card, you have multiple options, but the one I used was a direct bank transfer, as there are no fees or overhead in doing this. The mobile app makes this super easy - you select "Add Money", then it gives you an NZ bank account number to make a transfer into. This bank account number is unique to you, so you don't have to sweat about whether you've put the right magic numbers into the particulars/reference/etc. You just transfer the money to that account, and a bit later it shows up in Wise, with a nice push notification to your phone to inform you.
Major Problem: Bank Transfer Delays
This was the main thing that prevented me from using Wise for all our overseas transactions. You have to preload money into the card, and if it runs out you need to transfer some more.
I found that on weekdays during business hours, these transfers would complete in 1-3 hours. That's fine if you make a transfer in the evening for the next day, or even in the morning before you start traveling out to wherever you're going that day, but there were a number of times where we needed something "on the spot" and the transfer time was simply too slow.
On the weekends, the international banking system seems to go to sleep. I made a transfer one Friday evening, and it didn't show up until some time on Monday. This left me unable to use the Wise card for the entire weekend. I don't think this is Wise's fault, just how the banking system works, but if I were a banker, I would be embarrased. It's 2026! There's no reason whatsoever why important functionality like electronic money transfers needs to stop just because it's Saturday.
Update: Various readers from Australia, the US and UK have let me know that the bank transfer delay problem hasn't happend to them. It seems like it may be a unique characteristic of the antiquated NZ banking system, thanks to the
shared monopoly that the four big australian-owned banks have over it.
If you aren't from New Zealand, you may have a much better experience!
Minor Problem: Randomly getting prompted for PIN input
I'm accustomed to being prompted for a PIN when making contactless transactions over a certain dollar value at home, and overseas was similar using the ASB visa. Many places will have a sign or something that says PIN required for contactless over $X, and when I was prompted in this manner, it was fine.
The Wise card however, seems to also randomly prompt for a PIN on transactions at any value level every so often. I'm not sure why this happens, perhaps it's a "security" feature on their part, but it's very annoying because it's completely unpredictable. Additionally, when it happens it seems to manifest as the transaction declining, and then re-prompting, rather than just a simple "ask for PIN". This happened about 10 times for me, and whenever it did it seemed to be quite confusing to the cashier. Most of the time they would say something like "That transaction failed sorry sir, I think you might need to try again with a PIN?", but one some occasions they were flummoxed, and I ended up falling back to the ASB visa. If you work for Wise, please fix this.
Workaround: Use Apple Pay
I added my Wise Card to Apple Pay on my phone for convenience, but through trial and error I discovered that this random fail / PIN prompt only happend when using the physical Wise card, and never when. using it via Apple Pay. Thereafter I basically stopped using the physical card entirely, and didn't have the problem any more.
Trivial Problem: I couldn't use my Wise card for Apple Pay Express Transit
In London, Rail, Subway and Buses all allow you to tap on and off using a contactless payment card (typically a credit or debit card). You can use your phone for this too, provided you have Apple Pay active with a linked Credit card. Apple calls this Express Transit. I assume Google/Android have something similar.
My phone had both my ASB Visa and Wise card activated for Apple Pay, and I was able to use both interchangeably when making purchases, but when I tried to set the Wise card as the active one for express transit, it simply failed saying it could not activate. I don't know if this is a limitation of the Wise card, or just a transient bug I hit at the time. It wasn't a big deal, I was able to use my phone for buses and trains, and it linked back to the ASB Visa, but it would have been nice to send these through Wise as well.
(To be clear, the Physical Wise card worked fine as a contactless payment for London Transport)
Fees
Rough summary:
For every NZD $1000 I spent with Wise, I lost $3 NZD to fees
For every NZD $1000 I spent on my ASB Visa, I lost $11 NZD to fees
Wise Card
The way that Wise models different currencies is a bit like having multiple accounts behind the one card. Your card can hold some amount of each currency (up to 40). At one point I had some NZD, GBP and EUR of varying amounts all in it at the same time. You only pay a fee when you convert between currencies.
As promised, there were no fees transferring money to my Wise card from my NZ bank account using a direct bank transfer, and when I converted NZD to GBP, I was charged a 2.99% fee for this. The fee didn't vary, whether you converted $1000 or $10.
ASB Visa (baseline)
My NZ bank and Visa card are in NZD, and there's no additional fee when purchasing things in NZD. When purchasing things in foreign currencies however, you end up with two transactions in your statement, roughly like this:
| Description |
Amount |
| OFFSHORE SERVICE MARGINS |
$6.89 |
M&S BRISTOL CABOT CIRCUS LONDON
140.40 POUND STERLING
at a Conversion Rate* of 0.4280 (NZ$328.06) |
$328.06 |
(You can do the maths to verify the advertised 2.1% service margin)
However, I'm also enrolled in ASB's
True Rewards loyalty program, which for my card gives back 1% of the spent amount in rewards dollars. Rewards dollars are 1:1 with NZD, and we can spend them a many places we regularly shop in, so it's effectively 1% cashback.
Before we left, I did some quick searching and I was unable to find anything definitive as to whether I'd get rewards dollars on foreign currency purchases. I assumed that I wouldn't earn them, however upon inspecting bank statements after the trip, I've verified that I did indeed earn rewards dollars on overseas purchases.
For the time period that we were away, I added up the amount spent on my card (which was almost entirely foreign currency purchases), and compared against the rewards dollars. I found that (once removing the offshore service margin entries) the rewards dollars earnt exactly matched the amount spent. This brings the net overseas currency conversion fee down to around 1.1%.
Exchange Rates
Rough Summary:
Wise gave better exchange rates, by roughly 0.27%
Wise says they use the mid-market conversion rates. I wasn't able to find anything definitive about which rate ASB uses.
The GBP <-> NZD exchange rate was roughly around 0.43 (1 NZD buys you 0.43 GBP) for most of the trip, however in the detail it fluctuated quite a bit. The first conversion I did using Wise on 17 December 2025 used a rate of 0.4332, while the last one on 16 January 2026 used a rate of 0.4284. Both the Wise and ASB
Because I was using both the ASB Visa and the Wise card at the same time on the trip, I was able to compare transactions on the same day, to discover if there was actually a difference. One example:
On the 8th of January, I used Wise to convert some NZD to GBP. This used an exchange rate of 0.4293
On the same day, I made three transactions on my ASB Visa card. These used exchange rates of 0.4266, 0.4267 and 0.4266.
This rate-difference applied to other transactions on other days, and overall the Wise rate was better by roughly 0.0027, or 2.7%
Sidenote: Auto vs Manual currency conversion with Wise
At first, I loaded money into the Wise card, and then immediately converted all of it into GBP.
However, wise has a feature wherein if you make a purchase in a currency, but your card doesn't have any GBP in it, then on the fly they will automatically convert from a currency you do have loaded. I ended up using this feature by accident because I loaded some NZD but forgot to convert it.
These automatic conversions always worked, and looking through transaction records, they didn't cost me any more than had I done a manual conversion.
This wise help article says personal customers are limited to 15 currency conversions in 24 hours, so you might not want to rely on auto-conversion if you're using it for every transaction.
If we did another trip like this, I think I would do something like
- Load larger amounts of money into Wise per batch but leave it in your home currency
- Each day, do a currency conversion to your target currency for roughly what you expect/budget to spend. If you go over that number, the auto-conversion will kick in and you'll be fine
- At the end of the trip, you may still have some money left, but most of it should still be in the home currency, and you could transfer it back out of Wise with no penalty
Conclusion
Despite the cost savings being relatively minor, and the annoyance of the bank transfer delay times, I was still very glad that I had the Wise card. The increased peace of mind of having multiple cards while travelling - should one get cancelled, frozen or stolen - was definitely worth the cost, even if I'd saved $0. I think the next time I go on a work trip to Australia and have to expense things back to the company, I'll put them all on the Wise card to make the foreign-currency accounting much simpler, and keep them separate from my normal Visa.
Of course, this is just my experience and comparison with my own existing Bank Visa. Different banks have wildly different credit cards, products, and conversion rates, so while Wise was marginally better for me, it might be significantly better for you. Good luck!
