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Comment by ajdlinux | Hacker News Reader

FWIW - having to wait for pending transactions to post before filing a chargeback is how traditional banks have treated me, and I'm guessing is probably just part of the Visa/Mastercard dispute resolution process (someone who knows better might correct me here). Though you'd think a next-gen mobile-only bank would be able to put some additional automation around the process so that they would contact you again on the day the transaction posts to confirm you want to go through with a chargeback, or something like that.

The rest of the story looks really, really bad for Revolut - I have never had a traditional bank speak to me like that before.

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Visa/Mastercard use a DMS or dual-message system that is basically a digitisation of the paper-based "click-clack" machines, possibly with a phone-based pre-authorisation.

The first message is the auth which comes online. This can only be accepted or declined. Once it has been accepted the value of the transaction is reserved against the credit limit but no movement of funds takes place. The issuing bank can remove the auth manually, but this just releases the credit, it has no impact on what happens next.

The transactions are posted to the account in overnight batch, during which the card system will attempt to match the pending auths and remove them. Some transactions (such as recurrent ones) will have no matching auth. There is no opportunity at this stage to "reject" a transaction, the batch is applied or it isn't. The issuing bank will typically get or more batches per BIN.

The dispute process at this point involves the issuing bank (Revolut) issuing a chargeback against the acquiring bank, which triggers a process during which each bank has certain timeframes to reject or accept the chargeback. So from this standpoint Revolut is basically following standard process.

> having to wait for pending transactions to post before filing a chargeback is how traditional banks have treated me

Yeah, I guess they have a reason for doing that, though I don't know what it is. Still, I would have thought they can cancel it in cases of fraud? Maybe it's so you can't "dine and dash" or similar.

That's why they are called _transactions_. They are an immutable journal of amounts coming in and going out.

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