Think having the ability to block a payment to a particular vendor would be a good function to have with the ability to unlock after a predetermined/set amount of time.
For example someone with a betting problem block Betfred for x amount of time (indefinite)
Or in my case I always nip to McDonalds on the way home, could set rule block payment at McDonalds if unblocked takes 60 mins.
The likelihood I would still want a McDonalds is low after 60 mins I’d just drive past and sort food when I was home so would be a good spending control.
Could work for a lot of different scenarios to control spending In a world where spending is increasingly easy to do with contactless and 1 click purchases
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You can already block all gambling payments in app
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The problem with that is there is no way to guarantee a retailer block. For example Mcdonalds, not all will report the name the same way, there are a few big franchises, they may say Mcdonalds on your statement but the details they send to the bank will be different to other McDonald franchises and company owned ones. So it would mean scanning every transaction for a name to block, with millions of transactions that’s a lot of processing power and work for something most probably would never use. Transaction blocking like gambling relies on using MasterCard codes rather than a retailer name so it’s simpler
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I guess you could select a particular transaction, like I can do to indicate monthly repeat payments to Netflix or Google Play Music and the like, and block that
So you could choose to block the McDonalds near to you, but agree that a broad block is hard to achieve (and would possibly result in false positives as well)
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