From FlyerGuide Wiki

Hi, I'm the anonymous user that reported in August 2008 that the Capital One cards are passing along the 1% Visa/MC fees. I live in Thailand and work for a US-based company, so it's really important to me to get the best exchange rate.

I've used, and have access to all of the following cards. Of the cards I used overseas: Capital One Professional MC, a Capital One Cashback Rewards Visa Card, an E*Trade Brokerage Account (Visa), an E*Trade Bank Independent Checking Account (Visa), A Capital One Rewards Money Marketing Account (Plus Network ONLY, no Visa). I also have access to my Fidelity Investment Visa card.

Here is how I tested to determine that Capital One passes along the 1% fee. First you should know that Thailand and the THB have an on-shore and off-shore rate, so using a service like Oanda, or any other currency rate provider will yield inaccurate results, because they almost always use the off-shore rate, rather than the cheaper on-shore rate.

First off, every day I checked the rate at http://corporate.visa.com/pd/consumer_services/consumer_ex_rates.jsp and kept a spreadsheet. This is the official Visa site that gives the rate for transactions posted the a certain day. It's important to keep a spreadsheet, because you cannot go back in time to receive historical quotes on this site. Then I would charge transactions on my Cap1 accounts and wait for them to POST to my online statement. Using the Posting date (NOT the transaction date), I would compare the posting date to my spreadsheet and determine how much over the visa stated exchange rate my Cap 1 cards were charging. For both the MC and Visa, they were charging on average .7%-1% above the Visa quoted rate for transactions posted on a given day.

I can confirm that I can actually get a lower rate, because I have ATM transactions that post on the same day, and the rate does not include the 1% surcharge. I can also confirm that the E*Trade & Capital One MM accounts do not charge any fee when using them at a foreign ATM. Identical withdraws one right after another confirm that all 3 of my ATM cards receive the same 0% exchange fee on overseas ATMs.

The third reason why I suspect Cap1 now passing along the 1% visa/mc fee is that I am unable to get a representative to confirm that they absorb the 1% fee. The only thing they are trained to say is that "THEY do not charge a fee", but this is misleading because visa and mc tac on the fee and not cap1.

I can provide you with my spreadsheet and PDFs of my online capital one statement, if you would like to see them. Thanks.

--matt