We’re all excited for the current account launch, and rightly so. Monzo has been a money saving tool for more than 100,000 card holders so far and things will only get better once the accounts launch. I have one thing that is niggling away on my mind though
Mastercard Debit
It’s been a real problem with the pre-paid model where many websites don’t realise/pick up that the card isn’t a credit card. This can lead to paying a credit card fee, highly annoying.
When we do get the real mccoy, do we know if this will still be a problem?
Hi Ben, I’ve updated the title of this post (it was originally “Current Account Debit Cards”) to a title that other users will recognise if searching for the same issue & moved it to Bug Reports, as this is probably where they’re more likely to be looking, if they see this issue while using the prepaid card. Shame the title’s a bit long now…
Wasn’t really a bug, more a question for the team. Not sure if the numbers on the debit cards will be recognised as a debit card rather than a credit card.
The team need to answer this but based upon my own work with card networks id be very surprised if they didnt correctly identify as mastercard debit. I believe how this works is the scheme (e.g. mastercard) delegate part of their bin range to an issuing bank and the part delegated would be within the range agreed at scheme level for the product (credit, debit business). This is what enables merchants/processors to identify the card type without knowing/needing to know the particular issuing bank (which they normally would not know)
I find different retailers buy a BIN directory (BIN being the first 6 digits of a card) from different suppliers. There can be discrepancies between different databases.What may show as a MasterCard debit on most may show as a Visa debit on a few. Also say you use Argoscard website or telephone call center they have some MasterCard Debit cards wrongly appearing as Mæstro Debit. The other issue is some retailers get live or weekly updates whereas others may only manually update their database every 6-12 months
Unfortunately, I don’t think this situation will improve once we issue debit cards. We’re registering a new BIN which has to get added to all merchants so it will go through the same problems of them adding it incorrectly
Hopefully at least in this case with us being directly connected to Mastercard, we should be able to resolve things quicker
Also on a related issue it can often be a problem with new sort codes that some websites reject them as they don’t yet appear in their sort code database, or they update these not as frequently as desireable. So when you try and set up a direct debit with an account at a new bank it may keep erroring and say sort code invalid
