HSBC VISA Debit card

Inactive

The bonus of having an HSBC Maestro Card over their Visa one for me is, no added transaction fee's when buying foreign currency with it.

So I prefer Maestro to Visa for that reason.

never-in-doubt

BruceyBonus wrote: »

I've used my HSBC Visa debit card on a train to buy tickets. The card was swiped through the conductor's Avantix machine so would have taken place offline, i.e. no authorisation.

when you got the card did it tell you at the top of your PIN advice that it was a full auth visa debit card? If so then you wouldn't be able to use it on train. It may be a full card, not the electron version.... look at PIN advice letter and it tells you the card type.

Not all visa debit refuse to work on trains, full accounts (if you have cgc) will work, mine does.

BruceyBonus

never-in-doubt wrote: »

when you got the card did it tell you at the top of your PIN advice that it was a full auth visa debit card? If so then you wouldn't be able to use it on train. It may be a full card, not the electron version.... look at PIN advice letter and it tells you the card type.

Not all visa debit refuse to work on trains, full accounts (if you have cgc) will work, mine does.

Mine didn't say anything about being full auth. Does your card number start 4659?

savagej

You can use on-line only cards that are Visa Debit on board trains as you can also Mastercards such as the Cashplus.

Stanai

Karl_Chapman wrote: »

I have a HSBC PLUS debit card, it has a really modern design and is black like the premier cards, I first saw it advertised at Cambridge railway station on a large billboard display in november 2008. I opened a plus account up in January 2009 that comes with £3000 life insurance, vehicle breakdown assistance, travel insurance and identity theft protection for £12.95 a month, I like the maestro symbol and am pleased with the card but I just recently had a letter saying that in the next few weeks they are changing it to Visa. I just hope they put as much effort into the design as they did advertising the old one. Since Visa changed it's symbol from a flag to the new visa I think it looks tacky like all the poor people who sign on at the job centre have visa debits for giros to be paid into their bank account after the post office giro system was replaced. So the new HSBC PLUS card better look respectable.

The new HSBC PLUS visa debit card arrived today and it is good. So goodbye maestro. It doesn't say visa debit it just says VISA like a credit card symbol and at the top of the card it says debit.

PaulW922

I don't think this is anything to do with extra charges by the banks and changing accounts won't really help, becuase Maestro is rapidly disappearing from UK banks. I have found that I cannot use my Maestro overseas - for example in Singapore it is virtually useless. UK Maestro is a Switch card plain and simple and the main reason for the change was that the Switch owing banks had to change to Chip and PIN - the infrastructure was quite old so they decided to sell up to Maestro completely and use theirs

Most banks are now switching away to Visa becuase of the wider international acceptance - and in fact one of the only remaining Maestro issung banks - Yorkshire/Clydesdale is going to issue the new 'Mastercard debit' this year.

The issue of authorisation - always or sometimes, is not dependant on the actual card scheme but the individual card you have been given. It is now possible for the requirement to 'always authoise' to be encoded into the chip itself. This is another reason why cards such as Solo and Visa Elecron are starting to go from the UK (though Electron is popular worldwide).

As bank customers I don't think we have anything to be concerned about from this particular change.