Contactless card payments could become unlimited | Hacker News Reader

Contactless card payments could become unlimited

bbc.co.uk

12 pointsmindracer11 comments

Finally. UK is so far behind on payment technology, again. It took years for contactless to even appear in the UK at all while rest of Europe already had it. It's the same now - while in Europe I can pay a transaction for any amount using contactless, it just needs a pin - I literally just paid a €2000 hotel bill with my British credit card by just tapping it on the terminal, I just had to type in the pin, simple as that. But in the UK? Anything over £100 you have to put the card in. It's stupid.

I was talking with my friend who's living in the middle of East Midlands and she was surprised that we have a micropayments platform here in Poland. She left before it become a common thing to pay for variety of goods physical or virtual with 6-digits temporary codes generated by banking app. I guess there's nothing similar like this in the UK? She couldn't tell

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blik?useskin=vector

Nope, there isn't. There used to be a system pioneered by Barclays where you could pay anyone else just using their phone number, but it got completely switched off few years ago due to "low adoption"

"It just needs a pin"... Ah so not really contactless anymore, then.

Unlimited really contactless transactions are a recipe for disaster and they obviously know it if they require the PIN.

Yes, but the point is that currently in the UK you can't do a contactless transaction over £100, pin or no pin. The same transactions are allowed in the rest of Europe no problem.

The difference is only in having to insert the card into the terminal, which maybe doesn't sound like a big deal but a lot of stores put themselves in a stupid position where they have a small contactless terminal(with a pin pad!) attached in a way where it's easy to access next to the till, but if you spend more than £100 the cashier then has to dig out another terminal from under their station that has a slot. It's like trying to pay with a magnetic slot-only card all over again - maybe it's not a big deal but it adds friction where it doesn't need to exist, in France, Germany, Poland, Spain(I assume in all of EU at this point) you just tap your card no matter the transaction value, type in your pin if needed and that's it.

So unlimited unauthorized transactions? This is why I disabled the feature the first time I got a wireless card from my bank.

Yeah this is like the opposite of what I want. I have a Barclays Premier card specifically because it’s the only card I could find that allows setting a global hard transaction limit including for Apple Pay. I don’t want my bank balance to be drained in one transaction if I’ve entered a dodgy establishment.

This is a terrible idea, because it kills contactless payments for a large part of society. My mother lost her wallet once and it didn't take long until someone started buying hundreds of dollars worth of cigarettes with her card. As a consequence she decided to disable the contactless payment feature and now has to stick the card into the card reader the old uncool way, when all she wanted was having the pin be mandatory on every purchase.

How did they buy hundreds of dollars of cigarettes with the card though? Normally contactless payments are meant to require a pin every 5 transactions within the same day and the amount you can pay is limited - and most banks will reverse contactless transactions without much trouble since they are not hard authenticated.

This is unlimited but requires a pin above £100 - I don't see a problem with that, it's effectively what we have now but without having to put the card in

Could you buy 99£ cigarettes 100s of times?

No, it will ask for the pin after 3 times. So yes they could scam you out of £300 but then the bank will reverse it no problem.

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