Every time a traveler swipes a card abroad or settles a foreign invoice, they encounter a gap between the exchange rate they heard on the news and the one their bank applies — a gap that quietly raises the question of where cost ends and profit begins. In New Zealand, a listener's challenge to RNZ's money podcast prompted banking experts to examine the real mechanics behind currency conversion fees, finding a landscape neither as innocent as banks claim nor as predatory as critics suspect. The answer, as with most things in modern finance, lives in the uncomfortable space between genuine opera