Debit cards

To clarify, you bank with your bank - not with Visa; Visa knows nothing about you personally. Visa is essentially a transaction processing company that facilitates the interchange of payments between processing banks' retailers and issuing banks' cardholders.

Banks 'buy-in' to become members of Visa and can then issue cards with the Visa brand and sign up retailers to accept such cards. Member banks then have the collective power (size-dependent) to create rules and operating principles for such things as card-acceptance devices, card technology, dispute rules, card updaters etc etc but only if there is agreement within the membership. That said, in a previous thread some posters suggested membership rights no longer worked like this.

Back in the 80s, 90s and early noughties Continuous Payment Authorities used to cause major headaches for everyone, especially when account numbers changed. An account updater service was being talked about when I left the cards' industry in 2004 but I don't know exactly how it works and so can't comment specifically. However, only your bank knows when it has changed your account number, so any input into the updater service can surely only come from them.

It is true that your bank won't necessarily know the retailers with whom you have active Continuous Payment Authorities but they are able to identify Recurring Transactions from authorisation requests and when they are processed to your account and can tag your account in order to make use of the updater service if needed.

I would imagine that front-office staff in many issuers will have little knowledge of this service and you'd need to get in touch with someone in the back-office or disputes section for advice on the opt-out process.

HounslowBoy wrote: »

Thank you all, Visa have just emailed me stating they do not have account details and it is the bank I should talk to
Continuous Payment Authorities might be in operation with my Amazon account which has been around for awhile now but not on my ApplePay account because although it is setup on my iphone, I have never, ever used it for any payment anywhere which was also updated without any input from me.
I will follow up further with my bank and Visa and hopefully get an answer soon.

Let us know how you get on - it would be useful to know if banks are actually willing to let people opt out.

There might be some confusion here as to when the card updater works.

If an online/MOTO business holds your card details (Amazon, Moonpig, Sainsbury's, Tesco etc etc) to ease your check-out experience when you buy stuff, that is not a Continuous Payment Authority and the account updater will not be applied to those situations (as far as I am aware). Each time you make a transaction in this scenario you will probably be asked to re-enter your 3-digit CVV2; this shows that each transaction is separate and unrelated.

It is only where you have given a retailer permission to periodically charge your card for services/goods that are being continually rendered/supplied that the updater will be applied. E.g. a magazine subscription, insurance paid in instalments. Those transactions will have a Recurring Transaction Indicator included in the auth/clearing message so your issuer will know you have them. As stated before, though, your issuer won't know if you ever cancel them with the retailer, so they may still provide updates even when your subscription has ended.

Uxb wrote: »

Thank goodness they do continuously update!
The very last thing I want is for my annual car insurance continuous authority credit card payment not to go through because I had forgotten that the card ran out during the year resulting in the car being suddenly uninsured.

If that happens, the insurer should contact you before the previous policy expires.