How to withdraw money without fees in Vietnam

When you withdraw money from an ATM outside the eurozone, you’re likely to pay two types of fees:

• A currency conversion fee, which may be charged by your French bank, or by the ATM bank.
• Fixed fees charged by the ATM bank. This varies greatly from country to country and even within the same country.

To avoid currency conversion commissions, you absolutely need a bank card that applies the real exchange rate without any markup.

I recommend the following free cards:

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• Fortuneo (€50 referral code: JEMO8585)
• Binance (which allows you to get cashback: referral link)
• Crypto.com (cashback as well, $25 referral with this link)

As for the fixed fees from the ATM bank, there’s no secret: you have to try several banks and see if they charge fees.

In Vietnam, most banks charge 55,000 VND in fees, with a maximum withdrawal limit of 3,000,000 VND. That’s 1.8% in fees in the best case. Like everyone, we don’t like paying fees. When it’s below 1%, we accept it without complaint; above that, we think it’s a lot.

In Vietnam, we came across the bank ACB Bank.

Quite originally, this bank does not charge fees for withdrawals with European Visa cards.If you withdraw with a Mastercard, it doesn’t work and you’ll be charged fees.

One more illustration that traveling with at least two cards: a Visa and a Mastercard is a very good practice.

With ACB Bank, the withdrawal limit is 3,000,000 VND, but you can make consecutive withdrawals without any problem. I’ve made up to 5 withdrawals of 3,000,000 in a few minutes with the same card.

Even better: the ATMs of HSBC have no fees and a high withdrawal limit (10,000,000 VND at once).