Contactless card question

robfosters

robfosters

robfosters

Caporegime
Joined
1 Dec 2010
Posts
53,767
Location
Welling, London
if you use one on an empty account with no overdraft facility, will it knock the payment back or will it send you into an unarranged overdraft?

Also, is an unarranged overdraft still considered poor account management by the bank even if it is paid for quickly?
 
or in some cases unnaranged overdraft. as for the second questions, i never knew that was the case only as long as you paid it back asap without receiving their overdraft letters, it shouldnt be a problem.
 
Depends on the floor limit of the retailer. With contactless having a £20 limit that will be below a lot of the retailers limits and therefore will be a high probability it will send you into unauthorised O/D
 
It will be accepted up to 4 times and upto £20 before putting your PIN in (at which point you'll be declined).

In other words you can go up to -£80 and presumably face any charges your bank account has on it.

My local shop keeper knows when I'm skint and it's a day or two from pay day because its the only time I insist on using contactless payment :D
 
Yeh I believe it's authorised in a similar manner to pay at the pump petrol stations, a token payment of £1 is put through and then refunded to ensure the card is active, then you can use the card.

I believe estebarnrey is right, you can only use contactless a certain number of times per day up to a certain amount, then it's blocked for a period and you'll be asked for a pin, this limits the banks liability in the event of card theft, as they will have to reimburse you in the event of card theft due to it being so insecure, assuming you report the card missing in a reasonable time.
 
BDEE said:
Depends on the floor limit of the retailer. With contactless having a £20 limit that will be below a lot of the retailers limits and therefore will be a high probability it will send you into unauthorised O/D
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It also seems to vary between cards at the same retailer. VISA debt card is fine for contact less up to £20 at my local tesco though my AMEX has never worked above £15.

As for the limit on transactions - there is presumably also an exemption for certain things there too - for example TFL, I've swiped multiple times in a single day.
 
estebanrey said:
It will be accepted up to 4 times and upto £20 before putting your PIN in (at which point you'll be declined).

In other words you can go up to -£80 and presumably face any charges your bank account has on it.

My local shop keeper knows when I'm skint and it's a day or two from pay day because its the only time I insist on using contactless payment :D
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I used to go in, buy <£4.99 of the most vital stuff I needed and ask for £15 cash back :D Same idea, shopkeeper very aware I was skint :p

Most small shops don't connect to check less than £20 transactions, including cash back (or at least they didn't used to) they just get put through with the next, bigger transaction. When desperate and all that...
 
Contactless generally auths a transaction offline, so it'll go through regardless of the state of the underlying account (no balance, fraud blocked, closed etc). This is conceptually very similar but unrelated to floor limits.
 
Seft said:
Contactless generally auths a transaction offline, so it'll go through regardless of the state of the underlying account (no balance, fraud blocked, closed etc). This is conceptually very similar but unrelated to floor limits.
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This is correct , when the PED performs its end of day that is when funds will be taken out for contactless cards.

So yes you could go into a unarranged overdraft
 
Depends if the card uses online auth or not, solution I work with auth's offline up to £15. Lots of contributing factors, card issuer, merchant etc.
 
robfosters said:
if you use one on an empty account with no overdraft facility, will it knock the payment back or will it send you into an unarranged overdraft?

Also, is an unarranged overdraft still considered poor account management by the bank even if it is paid for quickly?
Click to expand...

Up to £20 you can put through even if you have no monies. The transaction takes about 2 days approx to go through. So yeah it will send you into an unarranged overdraft. So if you are skint with only a couple of days till pay day then lucky lucky :D
 
Surfer said:
Up to £20 you can put through even if you have no monies. The transaction takes about 2 days approx to go through. So yeah it will send you into an unarranged overdraft. So if you are skint with only a couple of days till pay day then lucky lucky :D
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That is not 100% true, for example the solution we use, which is used across a major hotel chain can auth online even for 50p. It entirely depends various criteria as I previously said :)
 
Contactless card with Visa and MasterCard is an offline transaction at the moment so will go through regardless of available £. A guy from Verifone who I worked with last week told me that MasterCard were in the process of changing to online and inevitably all the others will follow soon.

There is some online contactless out there but can't remember who they were.
 
Jimbeam3678 said:
That is not 100% true, for example the solution we use, which is used across a major hotel chain can auth online even for 50p. It entirely depends various criteria as I previously said :)
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when the PED performs its end of day that is when funds will be taken out for contactless cards
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I've never had a situation where funds have been taken the next day from my account. Always been at least 2 days. So within that 2 days i could theoretically take out up to the £20 max if i had near 0 in my acc (say £1 etc haha) I havent tested the full £20 though haha
 
I tried to use my RBS contactless visa debit card in Aldi this morning for £17 but it declined but luckily I had other methods of payment. :o Turned out I only had £6.xx in the account as available balance, so some places indeed check with the bank before authorising.

Luckily it's pay day on Friday. :cool:
 
Doesn't your bank have free o/d facilities? Barclays offer £150 or something like that of free o/d should you need it.

I always use the phone for literally every type of in-store payment up to £100. I have noticed that contactless payments show up as "pending transactions" in the online statement, even though I always have funds in that account. After a few days they clear off the pending list. I assume this is just how the mobile contactless part works though. It's the same in Android Pay as it is in Barclays mobile contactless.
 
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