It looks like Canadians finally have a good travel card available to them: STACK
It’s not an actual bank account, but rather a prepaid Mastercard.
Most important features:
No fees (including no ATM fees, no foreign exchange fees/markup, and no monthly fees)
User friendly app
Cashback/discounts with selected merchants
Free and instant transfers to other STACK users
However, since I’m not Canadian/living in Canada, I can’t sign up to try. So instead I want to ask all the s here if you’ve had the chance to try it yet?
I’ve been using it for a couple of months and it’s great! I would definitely recommend it to any Canadian traveling. I’ve used it a couple of times in Latin America and can confirm it has no fees and uses Mastercard’s exchange rate. The ATM you use might charge a fee, but I managed to find fee-free ATM’s.
The card also has lots of deals in the app. For instance, I received a year of Netflix for free when I signed up. I believe they were also offering a year of Amazon Prime for free, I’m not sure if the offer is still valid. RFD has a lot of discussion about the card here.
Although the Stack card has no fees, there are some usage limits to consider. Only two ATM withdrawals are permitted each day with a limit of $500 CAD per withdrawal. The monthly ATM withdrawal limit is $2000 CAD. However, for POS (point-of-sale) purchases, the limits are more reasonable. The Cardholder agreement lists all of the limits.
I’m not aware of any other options in Canada for a debit/prepaid card that has no fees. The debit cards that Canadian banks offer usually have a minimum foreign conversion fee of 2.5%. I hope the Stack card leads to some more competition and no-fee offerings.
Thanks for sharing @louisz! It definitely sounds like it’s a no-brainer for Canadians traveling abroad.
Have you had any issues using the card anywhere, or has it been smooth sailing so far? Given that it’s a prepaid card, I wouldn’t expect the acceptance rate to be as high as a pure debit card, for example.
I haven’t encountered any issues in using it so far at ATM’s abroad. For POS purchases, I have only used it in Canada and it has worked well. I know some people who have used it for online purchases and foreign POS purchases without any issues.
I’m curious to know how acceptance would be different between a prepaid card and a debit card. Are there certain types of purchases where are prepaid card would not work and a debit card would? (e.g. rental car, airline tickets, Paypal, money transfer services)
I used the e-transfer method to load the card and it was loaded within a couple of hours.
From the looks of it, they also use Peoples Trust Company for their financial layer (accounts, cards).
That means they’ll are likely to provide the same financial services than KOHO.
How’s the samsungPay with Stack? That’s something I am really looking forward using.
Yes, they also support loading via Visa Debit and Payroll Direct Load. With the Direct Load option, it’s loaded as an EFT transfer. So you can link the Stack account (i.e. Peoples Trust Company) to online banks such as Tangerine and EQ Bank and load it directly without fees. I linked it to my Tangerine account and it just takes 1-2 business days for the payment to arrive. I haven’t tried the Visa Debit method yet.
I had a Koho card but I cancelled it since they charged a 1.5% foreign conversion fee.
I have Stack. It’s good for free foreign ATM withdrawals at Mastercard FX rate or as a backup card when travelling.
For purchases in foreign currency there are now at least four 0% FX credit cards available in Canada. Free options with 1% cashback (Brim MC, Home Trust Visa) and non-free options with travel benefits and higher cashback (HSBC WE MC and Scotiabank Passport Visa).
I’ve been using stack for a couple weeks now and have previously had koho for awhile,
The one major change stack should strongly suggest doing it allowing there customers to send e-transfer a to non stack cardholders, and not just stack to stack (not everyone wants to have a stack card) and from what I’m seei g maybe allow there card users to pay bill with there card and not just load threw a bill which sound very confusing to do
Koho o the other hand does allow you to do all this so it’s what your personally looking for
I discovered that Stack can be added to Curve. I think it’s a glitch as Curve officially doesn’t support prepaid cards (except for a few European ones like Revolut) and it assigned “Mastercard credit” as default card name so probably an inaccuracy in their BIN database.
The potential benefit is that this effectively turns Stack from a Canadian prepaid card into a European debit card which may increase acceptance and/or avoid fees in certain situations.
s here if you’ve had the chance to try it yet?
