London Banter - View Single Post

Roland Perry · September 17th 14, 04:39 PM posted to uk.transport.london

In message , at 16:15:19 on Wed, 17
Sep 2014, d remarked:

If I can by a coffee at Starbucks by waving a CPC, and it ends up on my

bill at the end of the month, it does seem as if waving a CPC at a gate

ought to register my presence with enough information to bill me

overnight once I've also registered a touch-out. But clearly it's all a

lot more complicated than that, given the kerfuffle to get it all in

place.

I wonder how they (or the bank) deals with a card that accesses an account

with nothing in it and no overdraft allowed.

Quite likely, simply not issue a contactless version of the card. So we
are back to the Solo/Electron ghetto of yore.

Neither of the last two cards I've got (one a debit card on the company
account and the other a "travel money" prepaid Mastercard) is
contactless.

This is especially difficult as many (USA at least) tourists arriving in
London will have bought one of the latter at the airport (where they are
marketed aggressively) in order to get over the C&P thing where their
cards may not be compatible, and of course in order to have their money
in their pocket in Sterling.

Does the bank have some sort

of "special" overdraft for that or do they just refuse payment and the

vendor is out of pocket as can happen with credit cards?

On the other hand, TfL has gone out of its way in the past to say that
certain foreign issued and prepay cards won't be accepted. But it's not
clear if they mean "because they aren't contactless - duh!" or whether
they fail TfL's risk management tests due to the possibility of being
dry.

Now that CPC is fully rolled out, I expect we'll see more information
about both TfL's position on this issue and also war stories from
disappointed would-be travellers.

One possibility is that while they won't be able to get a balance from
the bank in the milliseconds it takes to touch in, maybe by at least
overnight they'll know to blacklist such a card's future use.
--
Roland Perry