There’s an app for that...

great for budget control. Different prepaid currency deposits can be put on one card, often without charges when you swipe or withdraw. The catch is you pay the fees, commissions upfront as you load, but lock in the forex rate too. MasterCard’s Cash Passport has no international ATM or transaction fees but, as with Visa’s Loaded For Travel card, they claw back cash through start-up, inactivity fees and commissions when you load currency ranging between 1 and 10 per cent. It’s just not in New Zealand (yet). Bring on the fin-tech (financial technology) revolution. One app is called Revolut, an app linked to a pre-paid Mastercard.

Travelex offers a similar product called Supercard. The apps offer travellers the interbank rates on currency – the rate in which the banks lend to each other. In contrast, banks and main street forex kiosks make their money adding cash withdrawal fees of between 2.75 per cent to 3 per cent above the exchange rate.

The card/app links to a domesticbased, pre-paid account and smart tech re-routes foreign transactions to the domestic account using the most cost-efficient currency and forex rate. You sign up for a physical card linked to accounts in three foreign currencies (pounds, euros and US dollars) and you can use it for purchases abroad as well as foreign ATM withdrawals for no extra fee.

Available now only in the UK and some European countries, these apps illustrate where the future of forex lies – and it’s a brighter (and cheaper) one indeed.

People will fret over how many socks to pack, but leave their foreign exchange until in the departure lounge. Here, they are hostage to shockingly bad bureau de change rates and high commissions.

Email if you have a travel issue you’d like Josh Martin, a London-based travel journalist, to write about.