In message , at 10:36:05 on
Sat, 2 Mar 2013, Richard remarked:
Most likely, TFL omitted to say "and if you have... issued outside the
UK, you *might* (depending on evolving agreements with foreign issuers)
be able to use it on buses...". But at this stage they don't want to get
into a debate of which and when.

I understand the need to launch the thing in stages, so buses first
makes a lot of sense, but I think that foreign card acceptance is one
thing that should have been sorted-out first. It is just asking for
trouble, argument and confusion in a great tourist destination.

AFAIK, the problem is in getting foreign card issuers to buy into the
feature whereby the cardholder is *never* asked for a PIN (on TfL or
other transport operators), which requires some new flag setting as well
the card issuer dealing with fraudulent purchases slightly differently.

It seems to be taking some time to roll this out world-wide. It may even
be the case that you need to wait for cardholders to get a newly-issued
card with this feature enabled (which TfL would be comfortable about
having happened in the UK, but not elsewhere), but I'm speculating
there.
--
Roland Perry