So I’ve just gone on holiday, and I’m faced with a minor problem. The country I’m visiting has a bit of a history with card cloning and scams.
While I understand there is guarantees and I can deal with unauthorised transactions that may occur I often take the approach of limiting damage. As such I moved my money out of my primary account, into a pot except for a predefined amount of my choosing and disabled my overdraft. As such I feel more comfortable now.
This lead me to think of an idea around secondary cards and some interesting uses.
If I had another card, I could link it directly to a pot:
- it could only make use of the pot value available
- simplifying it, it’s intended as a secondary service so Apple Pay would be silly (at least for my opinion as you’d only want your primary card)
- don’t link it to over draft access
- can be used by kids, you can put money into their pot and see their spending
- can be used on a night out to limit spending (yes you’ll just top up but still helps with your spending)
- can be used in risky locations like in my instance
- same benefits of freezing, etc
- switch which pot it is assigned to dynamically
- transactions still appear in your feed as per normal (perhaps indicating it came from a pot / secondary card in the fine print)
- brings back the benefits of pre-paid cards that many people loved about Monzo in the alpha/beta days, but still keeping the benefits of a full current account.
- I can keep typing
Anyways. Just an idea I thought I’d throw out.