MSE News: Supercards temporarily unavailable to new customers

Legacy_user

Travelex's Supercard is currently unavailable to new customers due to an "application processing issue"...

Read the full story:
'Supercards temporarily unavailable to new customers – but other travel cards offer comparable rates'

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The_Groat_Counter

From the MSE article:

MoneySavingExpert.com was told of the issue concerning delayed deliveries by a reader last week. However, we have since learnt that new customers have been waiting for their cards ever since the error first surfaced on 28 October.

Nevertheless, applications are still open to new customers – when we tried we could still apply – and nowhere during the application are the long-standing processing issues mentioned. Customers are only being told about the problem in detail via an email sent out in the days after signing up. ...

This is really poor behaviour on the part of Travelex, who offer the Supercard. Not impressed.

blindman

Good News

Travelex have solved the issue :cool:

They are closing the card

Supercards will cease to function from 00:01 GMT, Monday 24 July 2017,

PeacefulWaters

It's becoming clear that the specialist travel card with the perfect exchange rate is a loss maker for the businesses that try it.

They come, the look sexy, they adjust charges and remove incentives and eventually fade away into the abyss.

I assume cash withdrawal behaviour changed to their detriment when the 2.99% cash withdrawal fee came in.

Annoyingly, I'm in Chile when they withdraw the card. That's twice they've pulled it peak holiday season. Shonky.

At least Clarity lives on, albeit without my free fiver each month.

omega27

Got a letter from Travelex saying they're closing their Supercard on 24th July: https://www.travelex.co.uk/services/supercard

catwoman73

Exactly, Peaceful. I'm not surprised it is closing. It was probably losing money.

There's hardly any money to be made on credit card usage fees any more, unless your volumes are enormous, the fees have been reduced hugely in the last year or two. The likes of Halifax Clarity will hopefully continue because, unlike Supercard, Halifax will have extra income streams like interest or charges, or by the customer taking out other Halifax products. Supercard don't appear to have any of those, and perhaps even takes more profitable business from Travelex, if people used supercard instead of Travelex.

worried_jim

Got my letter yesterday, switched to Monzo yesterday. Next.

Lokolo

Thats a shame

JJC1138

It's a shame that the business model wasn't sustainable. I'd used a prepaid foreign currency card before (FairFX), and I didn't mind the ~1.4% fee but I always found it inconvenient to have to top it up regularly, so I liked the way that the Supercard worked — effectively automatically topping itself up by the right amount every time you used it.

I'd be very happy with a card that worked exactly like the Supercard, but charged a ~1.4% fee on each transaction. I wonder if that would that be a sustainable business model?

PeacefulWaters

JJC1138 wrote: »

I'd be very happy with a card that worked exactly like the Supercard, but charged a ~1.4% fee on each transaction. I wonder if that would that be a sustainable business model?

Why would you be happy copping for a 1.4% fee when there are so many cheaper alternatives?

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/travel/travel-credit-cards

jogu

JJC1138 wrote: »

I'd be very happy with a card that worked exactly like the Supercard, but charged a ~1.4% fee on each transaction. I wonder if that would that be a sustainable business model?

It sounds like you'd be very happy with https://www.imaginecurve.com/getcurve/ then. You can use code SULQG when signing up which will result in a £5 credit for both of us.

It does exactly what you say, except the fee is 1%.

You need an iOS or Android phone to use it. You generally get an instant notification about charges (often they pop up before the merchant has realised the transaction has completed!), which amongst other things should make any fraud much quicker to deal with.

Curve customer support seem good.

Even though I have a supercard, I've found that it got rejected a lot (due to an underlying issue in their technology) so I tended to use the curve instead, which I've yet to have rejected.

If you've clever about which credit card you recharge to, you can make back some of that 1% fee - eg. my curve card is currently setup to recharge my IHG card, and (if spent carefully) the hotel points earned can be worth more than the 1%.