I booked for parking at Manchester Airport online last night. You type your card number in, but aren’t given the option to select the card type. Prior to click pay it warns you there is a £1.50 surcharge for paying by credit card. Once the payment had gone through it had added the £1.50 charge to the total - obviously seeing the CA card as a credit card.
I had a similar issue at Jet 2 online. I selected the card type as MasterCard debit card, but it was rejected because it said it wasn’t a valid card number for the card type. When I changed the card type to MasterCard credit card it was accepted. Thankfully there was no charge this time.
I have reported this in app but I did wonder if anybody else had the same problem. Do any other banks in the UK currently use MasterCard debit cards?
It sounds like to me they have out of date BIN tables so when their database can not find Monzo’s 6 digit code it defaults to the credit card setting (It will still know if it is Mastercard or Visa from the scheme code at the start of the BIN)
Not here but on Starling they were having the same issue. I think they narrowed it down to a reused sort code which has been used by an old credit card company and the retailers haven’t updated their records with MasterCard.
The onus appeared to be on the retailer to update this, with a bit of harassing from customer service our end! This seemed to happen with a few retailers randomly, but once they update no issues.
It was also a problem with Fidor UK cards when their bank first launched and their BIN was not yet appearing in the BIN database some firms were using. The problem is some retailers don’t update it every month, but maybe only do it once a year or when hardware replaced.
It is not going to be a problem with a sort code, it is the BIN or IIN.
Just had a response from Monzo, transparent, fantastic and helpful as ever & they refunded me the credit card processing fee I was charged. What more could you ask for from a bank?
Hitachi Finance just did that to me… 2.5% of a substantial loan repayment so it’s not a small amount of money. Hopefully Monzo can get it back off them as well as applying the cluebat to stop them doing it again.
Yes, definitely don’t do that! The risk to your credit score isn’t worth it, even though it’s within your rights per the MasterCard rules. I’d suggest filing a formal complaint so you can start the process of going to the Ombudsman.
