No. of Recommendations: 2
I don't know about the rest of Europe, but in Portugal I mostly pay for online purchase with my Visa debit card, and bank transfers for larger things. Normally bank transfers complete very rapidly IME (though the backend processing by the recipient to get it through their own systems takes longer, but that would be true of debit purchases as well).
Had an unpleasant surprise yesterday when I went to pay for my PT-US tax service with my Novobanco card, not noticing the service was charging in USD, and got about a 3% hit for international transfer / conversion fees. Though that pales by contrast to what Bessent, Trump, et al have done to the USD-EUR exchange rates in a year, and no sign of stopping.
