Smile.co.uk Debit card starting 4988

savagej

Since the introduction of chip and PIN and what is called EMV (Europay, Mastercard and Visa) chip standards the entire issue of card authorisations has changed.

It can seem quite complicated with people refering to BIN's, AID's and all sorts of acronyms that refer to different aspects of a card.

Unlike in years gone by when your magnetic stripe data never changed since it was written on by the banks card issuer now a bank can set up a chip in a particular way before it issues a card, it can then also through something called "scripting" when a card is put in a reader and goes on-line change any part of the chip's settings they wish to. ATM transactions are always on-line, and also cards can be coded with details of "a floor limit for the card" as well as the retailer having a floor limit, or it can be set to authorisation must be sought.

This explains why so many people are having so many different anomolies, you have some saying by card start with 4xxx and everyone with that number expecting their card to work in the same way. An example is where Cashplus pre-paid Mastercard can activate the card for the use in car hire, from a remote location and why effectively anyone can have a bank card these days.

Other examples include say Barclaycard sending you the card before they even decide if you really qualified, they withdraw the card and because the card is set so that the first time it must go "on-line" it can automatically have it's application as a credit card blocked.

That is in the term AID the "A" is the application, and a card can technically have more than one application. So in future it is likely a card would be a Visa debit card but also a stored value Visa card in case the authorisation system goes down. Again, these can be added and taken away remotely by the bank as soon as the card is put in the reader and goes on-line.

The whole set of EMV standards are available on the net

Hope this helps a bit.

Toe-Jam

Floor limits are a rare thing these days, most merchants have a 0 floor limit.

Floor limits used to be used when it was slow and expensive to process the card transactions, so they would save up all the small "safer" ones til the end of the day. Now most of the terminals are connected on an adsl line so its qucker and cheaper to just get them done at the time.

I have an Offline card with Cheque guarantee and it authorises every single transaction and will decline if no money.(Ulsterbank)

I have a full auth electronic use only card and it will allow transactions through when there isn't enough funds if its under £10.(Santander)

hate-banks

ok thanks to both of you, I understand it better now.