Mention of a new Apple Card feature in iOS 27 brought to mind a banking app feature I recently had to enable after discovering it was not on by default.
This too relates to automatically recurring card payments, and it turned out not to work in the way we might expect it to …
The gradual expansion of fintech – financial technology – has been one of the most useful tech developments in recent years.
A great many years ago, before banking apps, I had an Amex card cloned while I was in Hong Kong. Someone made a jewellery purchase amounting to several thousand dollars, and because the fraudster was smart enough not to risk maxing out the card, the first I knew of it was when I received my monthly statement more than a week later.
Fortunately, that was easy to resolve: I was able to prove that I’d been back in the UK for 24 hours before the in-person purchase in HK, and the transaction was immediately reversed. It could, however, have proven more complex had that not been the case. It could also have caused significant problems if the fraudster had maxed out my card while I was still travelling.
These days, things are very different. My banking app sends me a notification of every transaction, typically arriving within 30 seconds of each purchase. Or, to be more accurate, I thought it did. It turned out there’s an exception that enables a recurring transaction to fall between the cracks.
If I give my bank authority to debit a recurring amount directly from my account, then that will appear within the recurring transactions section of my banking app. I do regularly review these to ensure I’m not continuing to pay for subscriptions I’m no longer actively using.
However, where there is a card authority for a recurring payment, then it isn’t listed as a regular payment authority, nor do those transactions send immediate notifications, as the transaction was not triggered by using a payment terminal. The only way those transactions show up by default is by manually reviewing bank statements, which is not too different a situation than I found myself in pre-fintech days.
I discovered this during a manual review when I spotted a card transaction for a subscription I’d previously cancelled. For whatever reason, the cancellation hadn’t been processed. That too proved easy to resolve, but it did highlight a reporting hole I hadn’t previously realised existed.
In my banking app, it turned out there was an additional transaction toggle which defaulted to being off. It wasn’t at all obvious, as I did receive immediate notifications for all of my normal purchases. Once I toggled that on, I started receiving alerts for recurring card payments also.
To check whether you too are missing any notifications, open your banking app and look for the notifications section to ensure that everything is toggled on.
Photo by Michael lima on Unsplash
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