Money can often be a worry when we travel, and not just because of the cost of our trips themselves. Uncertainty regarding spending budgets is also a problem for many, and can open us to either high exchange rates or hidden card fees.
Luckily, as on-the-go online banking continues to increase in popularity, many travelers are discovering an unexpected way around these setbacks, and it comes in the form of simply turning on location services within banking apps before heading away.
Banks like the Bank of America are especially now utilizing tools like ip geolocation api to make travel easier at all ends. Here, we consider how, far from breaching your privacy, giving your bank a little location legroom could prove to be mutually beneficial overall.
Frictionless travel
It’s not unheard of for banks to shut down cards because customers from Florida suddenly start purchasing in Barcelona. Unfortunately, this can lead to significant monetary disruptions that, in many instances, require you to show ID in a physical bank branch before your money is released again.
Setting up travel alerts by contacting your bank directly in advance used to be the only way to avoid this, but often long bank call waiting times meant that even this could be tricky. By altogether replacing travel alerts and instead tracking your vicinity at any given time, banking location services therefore make it far easier to travel without monetary friction, and to rest easy that your cards aren’t about to become null and void on your first day abroad.
Fantastic savings
According to Bankrate’s 2017 survey, the average cost of out-of-network ATM withdrawals was $4.69. While using your bank’s own ATMs while abroad can help to avoid this, finding them isn’t always easy. Not to mention that, even if you were able to find a relevant ATM, you may have to pay more to travel there in the first place!
Admittedly, geolocation doesn’t knock these charges on the head as such, but it does provide you with an easy way to view nearby ATMs to ensure as many free withdrawals as possible. Geolocation discounts offered by many banks can also help you to find deals or cashback with nearby retailers that ultimately offset even the fees that you do face.
Fraud protection
We all take steps to secure our homes when we go away, yet it’s astounding how few of us protect our finances against fraud as we travel. This is especially problematic seeing as criminals often target tourists, and claiming your money back might be more complicated if you’re a victim of fraud overseas. With geolocation, however, banks are able to track our phone locations according to the nearest cell towers, etc., meaning that they can better pinpoint, and automatically block, purchases that happen outside of that vicinity.
With all of this in mind, simply sharing your location with your bank even for brief periods as you travel could help you to enjoy the monetary ease and benefits that have remained frustratingly out of reach during your trips until now!
We are happy to present this collaborative post to offer valuable information to our readers.
