By
Flora Haslam
Having just got back from
a few weeks in Mexico, I’ve faced the all too common frustration of having my
credit/debit cards repeatedly blocked. My bank now asks customers to
advise when they’re travelling overseas, providing the dates and countries they’re
visiting. While this is far from convenient I was happy to oblige on the
basis that my bank was doing all it could to prevent fraud and I’d have no
problems buying stuff and withdrawing cash. Sadly, this didn’t
happen! Despite registering both a VISA and Mastercard, both were blocked
for certain transactions – even when using a Chip and PIN device.
Banks obviously can’t
afford to lose any more money in the current climate – fraud costs the UK cards
industry £440m a year despite overseas fraud apparently falling 47% in the last
year, but I can’t help but think there has to be a better (and cheaper) way
than automatically blocking cards.
There’s clearly a market for technology to address this – in the interests of full disclosure we’ve done some work for one such firm that is addressing the problem by checking whether a customer’s mobile phone is in the same place as the card making the transaction. Unfortunately few card issuers seem to be deploying such tools. If one could offer me a more user-friendly, secure service today, I’d certainly be interested in switching!
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