We care though Thomas 
Thanks for all the detail and interaction on here
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Actually, the example you give is the pound getting stronger (€150 only gets you £120 instead of £135). If the pound gets weaker then €150 will get closer to £150. 
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Looks like Revolut has implemented verifying in app to reset the counter, hopefully monzo will do the same.
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Dozens have also gone for £135 as their SCA limit which suggests that Monzo might be the ones who have misinterpreted the regulations somewhat…
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Are they using the same SCA company/provider as the others?
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Have any others implemented SCA yet?
| Name | online | offline |
|---|---|---|
| Monzo | £100 | £30 |
| Starling | £135 | - |
| Revolut | £135 | - |
| N26 | £135 | - |
| Dozens | £135 | - |
| PingIt | £130 | - |
…
Revolut and N26 SCA is provided by Touchtech, so they will be the same. I’m not sure about Starling but heard something, somewhere that they are also using that company
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Why would they need to use a third party, seems reasonably simple enough to build.
Looks like other banks are implementing it though, maybe all the banks should ask the regulator to change the rules, it’s okay for my fingerprint/pin to authorise a 10k online payment but it’s not good enough for them to believe the customer that they have the card in their possession.
Pingit changed their mind from SCA doesn’t apply to contactless payments to a £130 contactless limit and reset in the app.
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Do you know of any others? Seems to be lots of regtech startups hoping clients will pick them as a solution. Most are just the 3D secure side of it.
Table showing what the main banks are doing
One other thing to bear in mind is that prepaid cards (as issued by e.g. Dozens and Revolut) tend not to have any offline authorization capability
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Absolutely. And in order not to break any community guidelines, all I can say is it’s a very ‘poor’ experience.
Having been left hanging the Co-op while the machine spins with 'authorising '. I vaguely remembered some message from Monzo about pin, so I checked for a notification and assumed I’d just enter in the app. But no, it just tells me it was declined and I need to enter my card. Which then means I have to wait for the coop machine to time out, re-select payment option, and finally now put my card in.
So all in all, and I know it’s been said before, but why the fig does the card machine not just frumping prompt you for your PIN which would just be really simple and obvious and a perfectly acceptable experience!
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So I’m going to have to agree the experience of going from a world of “tap’n’go” payments to having cashiers embarrassingly call out “Sorry sir, declined, please come back!” over the entire coffee shop every so often is more than somewhat poor.
Reading through these previous messages am I right in thinking that on mainland Europe the terminal machine simply asks for the PIN in addition to the contactless touch whereas UK terminals are expressly barred from doing this so have no option but to decline the entire transaction and restart the payment process?
If this is the case how did the major UK banks not howl that this would be a terrible experience and something needed to be re-thought?
I’d imagine that most people on this forum are tech-savy and somewhat financially astute if not outright affluent. So while the occasional (or now often) decline is somewhat frustrating and perhaps a little embarrassing for such people it’s easy to see it will be far more mortifying and worrying for people with less understanding of whats going on and less financial stability.
My wife received a SCA decline while on a night out the other day and not understanding what was wrong switched to using our credit card. Great, more debt for no reason. While we may be in position to pay that out the next day a great number of people in the UK do not have the ability to easily check their account status via smartphones or internet banking or even ready access to ATMs or bank branches and in such situations may continue to use credit cards (until they too decline perhaps?). That’s just one example of a hard decline instead of a reasonable ‘please provide further authentication’ experience causing confusion that leads to real affects.
The supposed reason this SCA rule is forced on the majority of people who didn’t ask for it with no way to opt-out is to combat fraud, ie some people are losing money through the direct and sole fault of criminals.
I guarantee people with less understanding of what’s happening will make poor financial decisions due to SCA decline confusion and will lose money, except the fault is now shifted entirely to themselves. Great work, really solves the problem.
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Hello Nick
Welcome to the community!
Great entrance there, and agree with you almost totally, but we parted ways on the last paragraph which I personally feel was a thought process too far
None of us have any great handle on how others handle their finances for better or worse - while I understand a lot of this well from a technical viewpoint, this forum constantly reveals that those with less money and/or technical knack handle their money in many ways, both baroque and unique, far better than I ever had before Monzo
And the last sentence makes it sound like Monzo even existed when this was all agreed!
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I would have thought there would be a more ‘Monzo’ solution to SCA. Such as, a push notification on your phone asking you to confirm/authorise the transaction every now and again perhaps (like it does when you use your card online), or perhaps every so many transactions/value of spend using contactless, the app promps for user confirmation of the last transaction in order to confirm the customer is still in possession of their card and is the user to reset the SCA limit.
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You would have thought this is technically possible, and on the surface it appears that Revolut have done something like that, but @thomas suggested above that there are Q&A notes from the regulator that could be read so as to disallow that
As the banks routinely refund customers who are victims of contactless fraud, the ‘some people’ you refer to are the banks.
Which goes some way to explain why they are not kicking up a fuss.
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Hi @SouthseaOne
Thanks for your response and I do apologise, of course I didn’t mean to imply Monzo was specifically to blame. It was merely a venting over frustration and wondering how all the UK banks (in existence at the time) didn’t point out that the implementation of this specifically in the UK will lead to a poor experience.
Of course not everyone will be concerned or confused by SCA declines however my wife (who is young, tech-savy and financially astute) becoming confused and making a less than ideal decision within the first few days of this scheme surely highlights there’s a long road to having everyone fully onboard with the issues and processes (particularly given I’ve personally not heard a peep regarding all this from any of the traditional banks?).
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