Most expensive banks for Netflix, YouTube, and other overseas subscription services in South Africa

Standard Bank and Nedbank have the highest fees for international subscription services in South Africa in May 2025.

The subscription model has become immensely popular worldwide for video, music, cloud, and software services.

Instead of paying a large once-off amount to own products, consumers have become accustomed to paying a smaller monthly subscription fee to access extensive content catalogues.

While that means consumers never own the media or have a perpetual licence for it, many prefer this to the old rental model for movies, series, and console games.

Several popular subscription-based services don’t have South African pricing, which means they are subject to a currency conversion fee.

All of South Africa’s major banks charge an extra fee for currency conversion to cover the costs and risks of converting one currency to another, including the spread between the buying and selling rates.

The fee is typically calculated as a percentage of the transaction’s rand value and levied on the same transaction.

However, most prominent video and music subscription services in South Africa offer rand-based pricing.

Nonetheless, many of these services are subject to another charge — a cross-order transaction fee.

Investec explains that this applies to all card transactions where the merchant or cash provider has its banking service provider outside of South Africa. 

Investec marks all transactions with local merchants and cash providers with a “ZA” descriptor at the end to make cross-border transactions easy to identify. 

The cross-border conversion fee is reflected as a separate payment on a bank statement and transaction history. 

In South Africa, cross-border fees apply to Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, YouTube Premium, Spotify, and Apple Music, among other services.

Sometimes, banks may not explicitly refer to this cost as a cross-border fee in their schedule of transaction fees.

Instead, they account for both the conversion and cross-border fees under an “international transaction” or “international purchase” fee.

International transaction and currency conversion fees analysed

MyBroadband analysed the various foreign currency conversion and cross-border payment rates that nine of South Africa’s major banks charge.

We found that Bank Zero offered the lowest foreign currency conversion rate on a percentage basis, charging 1.25% per transaction.

It was also the only bank that charged no fees for rand-based subscriptions to international services, regardless of where their bank account is based.

FNB and Investec had the second-lowest currency conversion and cross-border charge of 2%.

Customers of these banks will pay roughly R1.99 extra on a R99 Netflix Basic subscription or a R3.98 fee on a R199 Netflix Premium plan.

In percentage terms and for all transactions above R110, Nedbank and Standard Bank had the highest rate of 2.75% per transaction.

A Netflix Basic and Premium subscription will cost an extra R2.74 and R5.47 in cross-border fees with these banks.

Capitec and TymeBank were the only banks that charged a fixed fee per international transaction.

At R3 per transaction, these banks are the most expensive for lower-value payments under R110.

However, they are much cheaper in percentage terms than all the other banks, apart from Bank Zero, for transactions over R200.

For example, on a R500 international subscription, the effective percentage of the R3 fee works out to just 0.6% of the transaction value.

The table below summarises the international currency conversion and cross-border fees charged by the biggest banks in South Africa.