This isn’t true.
Unless there’s some unique mitigating circumstances at play here, card replacements are an automated process, and anyone in COps can manually trigger a replacement also.
Would you mind DMing me your email address, please, so I can look into what’s been said?
Update:
Apple have run a load of diagnostics and will send it off to Apple Engineering, in my experience when I used to work at Apple this will take weeks if they ever reply, so we’re out of information there.
Monzo’s payments team are still looking into this but have said they’ll get back to me
There still hasn’t been any more notifications about other declined/unknown payments since that one day it happened and my Santander Apple Pay card isn’t affected, so I am inclined to believe the hypothesis above that these push notifications were somehow misrouted.
My replacement card has now arrived and I’ve re-added it to my iPhone.
@simonb Indeed the staff did trigger the replacement as you said (possibly twice), however the card was meant to have shipped on Monday, it didn’t I was told by staff on the phone this was because the person who dealt with this was away.
This is all automated, so if you can let Simon know we can pass that feedback on so were making sure we’re giving the correct information.
To collect your card from the office, the person is away, but not standard replacements.
I have DM’d Simon already, thanks for the update.
Ah. I’m off now until the 2nd, but it sounds to me like there’s been a misunderstanding somewhere in the chain. Not sure where but I’ll investigate next week.
Card orders are completely automatic. We automatically send the requests in batch multiple times a day to the card manufacturer facilities. This includes regular, priority tracked and international orders.
For priority and international orders, the card manufacturing facility come back to us after the orders have been shipped with a list of tracking numbers. This is the only part of the chain that’s presently manual - and my understanding is that it’s the person at the card manufacturing facility who sends us the tracking numbers, who was away. So the cards still would have shipped in the same timeframe, but we didn’t have the tracking numbers in the usual timeframe.
Really sorry about this - it does seem that the communication broke down somewhere. I’ll be sure to take a thorough look next week.
Yeah no worries, basically sounds like the phone staff don’t know how the process works but yes, I got a tracking number for TNT however they never collected the card from your manufacturer which is why it couldn’t be delivered on Wednesday, and it looks like a second card got shipped via DPD on Friday for Friday and still hasn’t arrived.
However thankfully the TNT card has turned up so this is all good, still really keen to see what the outcome of the Apple Pay issue is.
Hi @unknowndomain,
I was actually one of the people that looked at this behind the scenes 
Please accept my apologies for any confusion.
Card orders weren’t being processed on a few days this week as a result of the Christmas break and as Simon mentioned above, the person responsible for sending us tracking numbers at the card manufacturer was off for a few days this week so we weren’t sent to us sadly (Monday was a half day and production resumed on the 27th). That’s where the confusion on whether your card had/had not been produced stems from I think.
It sounds like your card might have been ordered on one of the vacation days, so wouldn’t have been processed and produced until today. I’m glad it has arrived now though 
We did order you a spare replacement just in case though - that’s the DPD order so now you’ll have a spare!
Very enlightening, thanks for your help.