Pre-Authorised Transactions

JuicyJesus

innovate wrote: »

What might help people in managing their finances is if the POS terminal, or the Internet transaction, showed something like:

• £x available in your account after this transaction. Continue Y/N? or
• we have been unable to check your account balance. Continue Y/N?
• we have been unable to authorise this payment. Please contact us on 0800-xxxxxx for further information

A nice enough idea, but it would require the whole credit/debit card system to change. The terminals don't receive any response other than "Approved" or "Declined". The balance doesn't even come into it. All they do is ask the bank "If we send you this transaction, will you pay it?". Why the bank takes a certain decision is internal to them, they just respond with yes or no.

What would most help people manage their finances is to actually manage their finances, since lots of people don't bother and blame other people when this inevitably has bad consequences.

pqrdef wrote: »

They tried that. They put "Electron" on the card, signifying "Electronic use only". It wasn't very popular.

Quite.

Gromitt

Plxply wrote: »

I like the idea of Visa Debit however I do agree that it should be more clear to the consumer whether the card is offline or online auth, as the only way to truly check is to either read the magnetic stripe or the chip or hope someone has uploaded information on the BIN

Another way would be to insert it into a Pay@Pump. If it says "Declined", you have an online card, if it says "Max spend £xx" you have an offline card.