Contactless card limit (UK)

[Metr0Land]

I've just had an email from HSBC saying contactless limit being raised to £45 wef 01April (though that's at the bank's end, it may take longer for retailers to get updated software on their terminals).

This is in an effort to reduce contact further, presumably other banks will do likewise. 

 

(Though of course a cynic might say it further aids the banks' ambitions to do away with cash - never let a good crisis go to waste )

 

[stewartingram]

I've had a similar one from Santander, who say they are doing in line with other banks.

 

Stewart

[jonny777]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/isabeltogoh/2020/03/24/contactless-payment-limit-rises-to-45-as-uk-fights-against-coronavirus/

 

 

It seems to be a national thing, and I believe it is a very beneficial move; if only for selfish reasons. I quite often go to retail outlets only to realise I have bought £33 worth of goods and can't just flash my card at the machine. This will be specially useful for fuel purchases, if I ever begin using any again. 

[JJGraphics]

If you pay with ApplePay (contactless on an iPhone or AppleWatch) with your Credit Card as the payment card, the limit in most places** is the available credit limit on your Credit Card. I do contactless payments with my AppleWatch for quite large sums at garages and in shops, etc., without a problem.

 

The lower limit which has just been raised is for contactless Debit Cards.

 

** Tesco have an idiotic £30 limit on ApplePay transactions regardless of the payment source which is extremely unhelpful at the moment. We shop with four other supermarket brands and know that Tesco are the only supermarket brand doing this.

 

John

[Jonboy]

At this point in time rejecting contactless cards seems like a less smart idea, although at the time I was still office based and had a contactless terminal on my desk as a permanent fixture....

[JohnDMJ]

I'd like to see the system used in Switzerland adopted in the UK.

 

There is no limit on which the card can be presented for contactless payment.

 

However, if the machine requires 'confirmation', there is only need to enter the PIN; inserting the card is not required!

[mozzer models]

7 hours ago, Jonboy said:

At this point in time rejecting contactless cards seems like a less smart idea, although at the time I was still office based and had a contactless terminal on my desk as a permanent fixture....

 

one thing you may not know about contactless payments

if the payment is flagged by the card user as one they did not make the the user gets a refund but the trader losers the payment & the goods plus A £25 fee which is why some small traders do not take contactless payments as they can not take the lose

 

Edited March 28, 2020 by mozzer models

[kevinlms]

1 hour ago, JohnDMJ said:

I'd like to see the system used in Switzerland adopted in the UK.

 

There is no limit on which the card can be presented for contactless payment.

 

However, if the machine requires 'confirmation', there is only need to enter the PIN; inserting the card is not required!

Australia has the same system. $A100 is the normal limit.

[bourneagain]

I`m not denying that it’s very convenient to have these contactless cards for those quick purchases, but I do have some reservations into their use. You should not be able to use the same contactless card for more than say 3 transactions or above a set total money limit without having to enter the PIN to verify you are the legal owner of that card. It’s far too easy for the criminals to steal a card and use it until at some stage they asked to enter the cards PIN, which by some strange coincidence that they seemed to have forgotten, by which time they have accumulated quite a large amount of goods, normally in form of cigarettes and drink.

[ejstubbs]

There are supposed to be algorithms which detect suspect contactless transactions or patterns thereof, in the same way that there are for "card not present" i.e. online or telephone transactions.  And it was my understanding that the system is supposed to request PIN entry every so often - though I can't recall ever being asked to do it since the first attempt at a contactless transaction with either of my two cards.

 

I had a contactless transaction on my debit card - for all of one pound! - actually declined at a local corner* shop yesterday.  I'd never been in there before, and I can imagine that it could be regarded as being the sort of place where a local scrote might try to use a stolen card to buy his Buckfast hit for the day.  My credit card worked fine, though.

 

2 hours ago, JJGraphics said:

The lower limit which has just been raised is for contactless Debit Cards.

 

And, AFAIK, for contactless credit cards when using anything other than Apple Pay i.e. presenting the card directly, or using Google Pay.

 

* It's actually in a small parade of shops, but "corner shop" is the term used in the rather carelessly-worded government guidance document about business closures - which I note has been updated since Monday and is slightly less of a mess than it was when it was first issued.

[Reorte]

I'm still very much in the stick to cash, find the "convenience" of contactless negligable category, although I have no problem with using contactless in the current situation.

 

[dvdlcs]

I always thought the UK limit of £30 for tap payment was rather low.

 

As kevinlms has said, here in Australia the limit is $100 and if I tap for an amount over $100 I'm asked for a PIN to proceed. No rejection - unless I get the PIN wrong of course :-)

[petethemole]

The banks recently (late 2019) introduced a limit of 5 contactless payments after which you have to PIN verify the next transaction. Annoying at present if you're trying to avoid touching things, but otherwise a protection against multiple uses of a stolen card.

[Steamport Southport]

4 minutes ago, dvdlcs said:

I always thought the UK limit of £30 for tap payment was rather low.

 

As kevinlms has said, here in Australia the limit is $100 and if I tap for an amount over $100 I'm asked for a PIN to proceed. No rejection - unless I get the PIN wrong of course :-)

 

The machines that use it have a keypad though. So if you want to use your card for a higher amount you can. You just have to spend a few seconds entering your PIN.

 

 

 

Jason

[EddieB]

There certainly didn’t used to be a restriction on consecutive contactless transactions.

 

I think I’ve mentioned earlier about a friend who replaced her debit card, to be on the safe side, after temporarily being separated from it while abroad.  Having handed over the old card to her bank, she then found it had been used run up over three thousand pounds’ worth of contactless transactions.

[polybear]

55 minutes ago, EddieB said:

There certainly didn’t used to be a restriction on consecutive contactless transactions.

 

I think I’ve mentioned earlier about a friend who replaced her debit card, to be on the safe side, after temporarily being separated from it while abroad.  Having handed over the old card to her bank, she then found it had been used run up over three thousand pounds’ worth of contactless transactions.

 

Did she find out who was responsible?

Edited March 28, 2020 by polybear

[The Stationmaster]

I don't like contactless payment but I will cheerfully admit that I shifted to using it about 3 weeks back.  However it's not always possible to go contactless but that is no worry to me because if I'm in a supermarket I have one hand gloved anyway to am happy to tap the keys.

[JeremyC]

In our family of four we all have contactless cards except for my youngest son who refused to have one because he doesn't trust them. Guess who is the only person in the family who has, to date, had a fraudulent transaction on his card!

Edited March 28, 2020 by JeremyC

[H2O]

23 minutes ago, The Stationmaster said:

I don't like contactless payment but I will cheerfully admit that I shifted to using it about 3 weeks back.  However it's not always possible to go contactless but that is no worry to me because if I'm in a supermarket I have one hand gloved anyway to am happy to tap the keys.

 

Corona virus is not caught through the skin, you can pick it up* by touching your face (AFAIK eyes, nose, mouth) with anything (including a glove) that has touched an infected item.  It is very difficult to take the glove off without touching the outside too, especially if only one hand is in a glove.  This is why it is important not to touch your face unless you have washed your hands.  Each to their own by the way.

 

* amongst other ways such as if you are downwind of an infected cough or sneeze etc.

Edited March 28, 2020 by H2O
typo

[EddieB]

48 minutes ago, polybear said:

 

Did she find out who was responsible?

Pretty good idea, but the bank drew a veil of secrecy...

[JJGraphics]

51 minutes ago, The Stationmaster said:

I don't like contactless payment but I will cheerfully admit that I shifted to using it about 3 weeks back.  However it's not always possible to go contactless but that is no worry to me because if I'm in a supermarket I have one hand gloved anyway to am happy to tap the keys.

 

We refuse contactless cards as we had repeated problems with them being "skimmed" in airports and similar situations abroad. Our accounts are marked and we receive non-contactless cards when they are replaced. The amount of the individual skims was relatively small, typically only about US$20, but the time wasted in going through the process of reporting the problem, getting the transaction removed and getting replacement cards became annoying.

 

Both my wife and I now use ApplePay via our Apple Watches for pretty much every translation we do with the exception of some countries which don't yet offer the service. It is quite some time since we actually took our cards out and used them.

 

ApplePay has the advantage that the process inserts another layer of security between our Credit Cards and the payment system which prevents the merchant from collecting any information about us and is impossible to skim.

 

Being of a certain age, we are often entertained by the surprise (and some degree of respect) shown by the young checkout operators and shop assistants when us old wrinklies double click our watches and hold them to the terminal to pay!

 

John

[The Johnster]

Similar story to Eddie B's friend; bank contacted me by post asking me to come in for a new debit card as they had 'reason to believe security had been compromised' on my existing one.  Ok, half hour schlep to the bank to check it was genuine, hand in the old card and pick up new one after 3 working days.  Some 2 months after this, found £300 missing from the account and a dodgy email asking me to click this link for another £200 available to me if I just gave my card details...

 

Now, I'm no genius but I'm pretty smart when I've had my 8 hours, and despite repeated requests to click on the link over the next hour or so I'm not falling for that one.  Into the bank again to claim my £300 back, and it turned out it had been debited to the old card, the one I'd handed in to them, so they were right about security being compromised.  They (Barclays) accepted responsibility immediately and refunded the £300, which actually took 5 working days but they offered me a £300 overdraft with no charges in the meantime.  I blocked the sender of the scam emails, but am very suspicious of everything now.  I've had, touch wood, no problems with the new card.

 

My main moan is corner shops which refuse card transactions below a certain value.  Not sure this is even legal but I am sure it is very annoying, especially if the cash machine isn't working or is one that charges £2.50 for a withdrawal.  Not so bad for me in my urban jungle where there are other shops and other cashpoints, but village dwellers must be severely disadvantaged by this sort of nonsense.  If you accept card payments, then you should treat them the same as cash; the card issuer guarantees your money anyway so you are not, as a shopkeeper, taking a risk, just using it to try to sell me more stuff whether I want it or not.

[Metr0Land]

1 hour ago, The Johnster said:

 

My main moan is corner shops which refuse card transactions below a certain value.  Not sure this is even legal but I am sure it is very annoying, especially if the cash machine isn't working or is one that charges £2.50 for a withdrawal. 

 

AFAIK there's no law that says they can't set a minimum.  The tricky bit is that differing card issuers have different rules about whether you can/can't and/or what that lower limit might be.

 

Corner shops argue that the amount taken by the card issuer is too high to make it worthwhile on small purchases though most card issuers refute this saying that as it's a pct of purchases it's irrelevant.

Edited March 28, 2020 by Metr0Land

[Gwiwer]

I have always been wary of contactless payment (UK) / EFTPOS (Australian) as there is a theoretical risk of fraud even when that is minimised at every stage of the process by the parties concerned.  I switched to making more use of it during my later years in Australia when some points of sale started declining cash transactions.  The $100 limit there equates to £47.96 UK (today's xe.com rate) though with prices generally a little cheaper in Australia than the UK the actual buying power is somewhat better than a £60 limit would be here.  

 

An across-the-board increase to the UK £30 limit is overdue.  That is a very low limit in today's world generally and will remove more cash and hand-to-hand transactions via the PIN device during the current emergency.  Whether or not it is a step closer to a cashless world time will tell.  Probably not my time however.  Cash will be around for many years yet in my humble opinion.  

 

Small businesses do sometimes set an arbitrary lower limit to card payments however I notice that locally to me all have removed that in recent days.  What ever the truth of the matter - and I am inclined to believe the small business side rather than the card issuers on this in terms of it costing the former transaction fees - they are now making more use of contactless payments than before.  

 

Ironically our corner shop has one of the still-free-to-use* ATMs in the area (others mostly now apply a fee) which remains in operation.  They have a paper notice taped to it saying "This machine costs us money to provide so please consider spending some of it with us before you leave".  Currently they are only taking contactless payments unless the customer does not have a card.  

 

* It's not free; I always find money has left my account after using it  

Edited March 28, 2020 by Gwiwer

[Not Captain Kernow]

1 hour ago, The Johnster said:

f you accept card payments, then you should treat them the same as cash; the card issuer guarantees your money anyway so you are not, as a shopkeeper, taking a risk, just using it to try to sell me more stuff whether I want it or not.

 

Totally untrue.  The card issuer does NOT guarantee you your money.  If the card turns out to be stolen and it was used in a contactless transaction, the card issuer will charge it back to the retailer, and in addition hit them with a £25 chargeback fee.  Rest assured, the only people who never lose out are the card issuers...

 

The chargeback fee is in fact a nice little earner for the card issuers.  Even if you prove the transaction is legitimate and the cardholder drops the dispute, you do not get refunded the £25.

 

The fees for accepting cards can often be a percentage, but also a fixed per item transaction fee.  Suddenly it does not look quite so attractive for a retailer to take a contactless (or any) card for a small amount.