GTBank charged me N225 per dollar for my Aliexpress order

Posted by Felix Okoli on Wednesday August 26, 2015 at 11:23:8:

I recently placed an order on Aliexpress for a value of $12.7. I got the usual notification from GTBank that the Naira equivalent of USD 12.70 has been authorized for the transaction done on www.aliexpress.com London GB. Since I know that my account will not be charged until after 24 hrs as usual for my bank when doing shopping on foreign websites with my Mastercard, I waited till the next day just to see how much the exchange rate will be. Well, I waited till the next morning and got the formal sms debit alert from my bank that I was charged the sum of 2,857.54 for the Aliexpress transaction. Calculating it mathematically by dividing 2,857.54/12.7, it gave me N225 meaning that the exchange rate charged to my account was N225. well, I have to say that it's a bit higher and seems more like black market price than official price for using a debit Mastercard issued in Nigeria.

As at the time of doing this transaction, the official exchange rate in Nigeria was N198 to a dollar and Amazon charges me N208 when using other Naira cards but with GTBank Naira Mastercard and my Aliexpress experience, the case was different as I was charged higher.

I've been using GTbank's Naira mastercard for online shopping on a couple of several websites in the past and that includes AMazon, Aliexpress and Miniinthebox. With their high exchange rates, I may have to try out other bank cards as well and see if it could save me more money. I guess I wasn't so keen about the exchange rate in the past and so barely noticed it but after doing the calculation recently, I just have to make some changes.