Snag in pre-pay cards

helmsim

I have a FairFX pre-pay card and have recently discovered a snag. Merchants can charge both an "Authorised" and a "Financial" charge for the same transaction, and this blocks money twice for the same purchase: the Financial charge should cancel the first, but that can take up to 21 days during which time your money is blocked. So in theory you need to take twice as much currency abroad as you expect to need in case all the merchants do this.

sharpy2010

Its not just prepay cards that suffer from this, its also credit cards and bank debit cards.

This archaic system needs bringing into the 21st century.

dalesrider

Problem is worse when debit and auth amount don't match.

But who said 21 days.... 14 is the longest I have ever seen.

helmsim

I have an auth item outstanding when the substantive charge was made 18 days ago - FairFX say that it's in the hands of the merchant and they are entitled to take up to 21 days.

chattychappy

sharpy2010 wrote: »

This archaic system needs bringing into the 21st century.

Agree. I think it goes back to an era when most transactions were not performed online (by merchants that is). For certain types of transaction or if you had suspicions you'd phone up for an authorisation code and then write this on the voucher. It might be several days before you banked the vouchers and things were matched up. It's weird to think that most transactions were done using imprinters without any check at all - except perhaps the cashier checking if a signature matched or if the number was on a watch list.

Problem is that it is a worldwide network and IT systems don't always link up. Even just a couple of years ago I remember using hotels in Asia that still used the old system.

Also, as far as I can recall, debit cards/pre-pay cards are relatively new. In the old days it was CCs only - and you always had limits way in excess of what you used. So these issues didn't really matter.