My local Co-op has had it ages, Morrisons have just updated all of their 24 checkouts to contactless, even my dentist has a contactless terminal. The local Tesco, despite being a new build, only open a few months, doesn't, which to me would seem to indicate a policy decision, rather than 'haven't got around to updating it yet'. Confusingly, they have adverts for the tesco bank card posted at the tills, which have a prominent contactless icon on them, which made me think it meant the till accepted contactless.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple Pay Confirmed to Have £20 Limit Per Transaction in UK
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
My local Co-op has had it ages, Morrisons have just updated all of their 24 checkouts to contactless, even my dentist has a contactless terminal. The local Tesco, despite being a new build, only open a few months, doesn't, which to me would seem to indicate a policy decision, rather than 'haven't got around to updating it yet'. Confusingly, they have adverts for the tesco bank card posted at the tills, which have a prominent contactless icon on them, which made me think it meant the till accepted contactless.
For supermarket automated checkouts that would actually be quite a cool added feature if there was some flag in Apple Pay to indicate that the Apple Pay user had been certified as 18 or over so that the till wouldn't go into the "staff authorisation needed" mode before checkout could be completed. I'm not sure how Apple could effectively and cost-efficiently check the user's age (which only needs to be done once on Apple Pay setup rather than for every transaction) but lots of companies do automatically search credit records and/or electoral roll information so maybe it would be fairly easy to do.
I admit it would be a lot of effort for very little benefit but personally I think it would be pretty cool and would save me all the times I have to wave my arms at some distant store assistant to get him or her to come over and certify that I'm old enough to buy alcohol before I can finish and pay just because I've got a couple of bottles of beer in with my groceries.
- Julian
Morrisons need to sort out their loyalty promotions, it takes so much time asking and processing them, they currently have three running, all of which have to be transacted separately, and will no doubt be adding their back to school vouchers soon, too.
They need to assemble all this on their (currently useless) app, so that it's just one swipe to pay, one swipe for loyalty.
For some reason Tesco Bank Visa Debit cards are contactless; it's just their Credit Cards (MasterCard) which aren't. Apart from a few select locations in Inner London I think a lot of the stores have the same (or similar) PIN pads they had when I worked for them 10 years ago!
Two of the Sainsbury's stores I frequent have similar terminals to Morrison's which makes me wonder it's a case of updating the self service checkouts to enable the function.
Just to note incase anyone hasn't mentioned this - You can only do 4/5 payments via contactless before you are asked to enter a PIN.
You are correct though it's a payments standard in the UK for £20 (soon to be £30) it's nothing to do with ApplePay
You pay a higher transaction fee (through the payment network) using contactless via Credit cards rather than debit, and the risk of fraud is higher.
Probably why.
Thinking about this a bit more I don't think this will be a benefit of Apple Pay in many (most) cases. If a payment is being made at a terminal that has been upgraded/reconfigured to fully support Apple Pay then it will be doing a point-of-sale authorisation for the transaction so it will probably show up immediately online anyway. If the transaction is being done using old style treat-it-like-a-contactless-card protocol which for a while will probably be the more common case then that is presumably one way only, i.e. the not-Apple-Pay-aware point of sale terminal simply uses NFC to read the credit card details and at a later time presents the amount and the card details to the payment processor to complete the transaction. In this case the Apple Pay client on the iPhone gets no communication back from the vendor's point of sale terminal to say who is taking a charge against the card and for what amount so the Apple Pay Pass card doesn't have any information to store about the transaction just made.
Yeah I believe Morrisons have rolled contactless out in all stores.
Tesco seem to have a mixture of payment terminals. Some stores have old ones and others contactless ones. I can only think of one Tesco near me that has the contactless ones and also has it enabled. Tesco Stores don't seem to have made their mind up whether to support contactless yet, as Morrisons have. And Tesco Bank won't support Apple Pay initially.
Sainsbury's have partnered with Zapp which could be a reason not to support NFC contactless.
All Apple Pay transactions will be sent online for authorisation according to this support article: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT202527
Here's what happens: You use your iPhone, for example in Germany. The card reader sees "this is a virtual credit card (not a real credit card, because it's really an iPhone) connected to a bank in the USA". Then it talks to the bank in the USA, the bank tells it that the transaction is fine, and it goes through.
If you had a UK credit card, the card reader would talk to the bank in the UK, and they are not ready yet, so right now it doesn't work.
But whether you can spend unlimited depends on how clever the card reader is. If you use your iPhone with a card reader that doesn't know how to talk to a bank in the USA, then all it sees is "here is a virtual credit card", and treats it like any credit card, and a plain credit card has this £20 limit in the UK - which is quite sensible, because if I stole your wallet with your credit card, you wouldn't want me to make £1000 purchases.
What nobody knows (outside the banks) is how clever the average terminal in the UK is. They might be set up already to talk to the bank, so your iPhone with a US credit card will work without the £20 limit, and an iPhone with UK credit card will work as well. Or they might be old and cannot handle more than the £20 limit. And there may be terminals that need a software update, or just some buttons pressed, to work without the limit.
My MagSafe adapter was £8. And you would hope that Apple Stores would be the first ones with terminals that have no limit.
Last edited:
Contactless payments are all treated like any credit card. Card readers already talk via credit processing companies to banks around the world, which is why Apple Pay can already be used anywhere with an American account (for the detokenization).
The limit is not about any of that. Here's the deal:
As everyone knows, the contactless payment limit is how much can be spent before a user authentication PIN is required.
Over that limit, non-upgraded terminals have no other way of receiving the PIN except to make the user insert their physical card and enter their PIN on the terminal keypad. This is the situation today.
However, even though they can have the exact same limit before user verification is required, upgraded terminals can ALSO accept authentication entered on the mobile device.
(On an iPhone that means either entering your passcode or using TouchID as the shortcut for that. On other devices it might be the same, or drawing an unlock pattern, etc. The terminal doesn't know the method; only that it was done.)
So, going over the contactless limit still requires user authentication. The only difference is whether both the terminal and the credit-card-issuers' NFC applets on the mobile device are updated to negotiate on and accept cardholder verification on the device itself. It's an additional way of doing the required user authentication.
Last edited:
That's not true. I've paid Amex contactless at Costa every weekend for the past year, and I've never had to enter a PIN.
I imagine other rules might swing into place for a series of rapid transactions, but a blanket statement of 4/5 payments needing a PIN is not correct.
That won't happen with current technology because an adult can always let a child register his fingerprint on the phone. The supermarkets, on the other hand, have a legal obligation to ensure that they don't sell certain products to children. It would be no legal defence for them to say that the child paid with a device owned by the parent.
I thought that it's not necessarily that you'll be asked for the pin when making a contactless payment, but if you've used your card for any other non-contactless transaction that required a pin, that counts and your 4/5 starts again?
Although saying that - I do remember being asked for my pin a few times when I first got my contactless card, but I haven't been asked for at least a year. I do make several chip + pin transactions in between all the contactless usage though.
Maybe its bank specific? I have to enter a PIN every 5 uses. (NatWest) I assumed it was to limit the exposure of a lost card to £100 before it became essentially unusable to the theif.
RBS have said that there is no need to register for Apple pay and all you need to do is just scan your card on your iPhone.
In the USA customers had to ring their banks to authorise it as well.
In the USA customers had to ring their banks to authorise it as well.
I guess there's still been no confirmation/leak of an actual exact date has there? Still hoping for it to be switched on with 8.4 tomorrow!
No official day of release. Nationwide had an advert in one of the papers the other day saying "Soon", but no actual date.
I hope it comes sooner rather than later in the month
Think it will be a long wait for Barclays to join with them launching their new contactless service on the 1st http://www.bpay.co.uk/home
Think it will be a long wait for Barclays to join with them launching their new contactless service on the 1st http://www.bpay.co.uk/home
It varies by issuer. I can't say for definite it's 4/5 for every issuer but most follow a similiar pattern
I read their statement. I'm pretty positive that RBS simply meant that no registration was necessary (or possible!) ahead of time.
They said that instead, regular Apple Pay registration would be used.
So unless they're willing to accept millions in fraudulent transactions using stolen card numbers, that means it'll be the same as the US: after you enter a card, then in most cases you'll need to be checked. Either you'll call a customer service number, or use a registration code sent directly to your phone or email, or some other way of identifying that you're the actual card owner.
Last edited: