Halifax "first UK bank" to offer gambling block

Some questionable (read: limited) research appears to have been carried out ahead of writing this article…

Does anyone else do it for their credit cards? I’m trying to be charitable here…

Good to see they have friction on it

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If they want to claim to be the first for something, then we can probably give them the first for credit cards…

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Most gambling organisations already prohibit the use of credit cards though. Just saying.

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HSBC literally introduced it last week for both - Proof: I enabled it myself following a genuinely useful heads-up on the other place

That article is very much a home town report!

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Yeah I’m pretty sure Barclaycard already blocks gambling on their card.

Bet you anything it’s a regurgitated press release and not an article actually written by an actual reporter.

You can find broadly the same ‘report’ on a few other news sites, at least one of which has amended it slightly to reading “Halifax said” for the ‘first’ claim.

To be fair, it’s not uncommon for incorrect claims to be made. For example, Monzo currently claim in their blog 10 features your old bank doesn’t have yet that it’s the only bank to allow customers to save spare change automatically, through round-ups. However, Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland have had a feature called Save the Change for at least five years, that does precisely that. If your old account was with Bank of America, you’ve had that feature for over ten years.

Ok, Monzo’s fine print actually states that it’ll save the money into a pot, but most readers won’t notice that distinction.

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But there are still a lot of Monzo features that most high street banks don’t have

Emphasis is mine.

I agree that it’s not uncommon for journalists to misrepresent the facts at times, but the link you sent to Monzo’s own blog doesn’t use the phrase “we’re the first”.

Surely it’s irrelevant whether or not it states it’s the first? The link I sent is to a blog post that’s explicitly titled “10 features your old bank doesn’t have”. This is one of those ten features, and those three banks have it.

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If your old bank is NatWest or Barclays or any number of other banks not in that group you won’t have it. So… :man_shrugging:

Some interesting stats about the average value of a gambling transaction