Last week, we brought you news of Mastercard raising their tap and pay limit to $200. Now we can confirm that Visa are matching this increase, in response to the coronavirus.
Many retail outlets have ditched cash and moved to payments on Eftpos terminals. While you enter your card and pin, obviously that presents a potential health issue with it being impractical to wipe down every terminal between every transaction.
The far better approach is for retail customers to use contactless transactions. Most of our bank cards now support this (if yours doesn’t, talk to your bank).
Personally, I have connected my Visa Debit card to Google Pay and for the past month I’ve exclusively used my phone to tap and pay. While I’d normally be fine with the phone making contact with the terminal, in these times, I really do leverage the contactless possibilities with NFC. This means the approval for the transaction can happen when the phone is a few mm away from the surface of the terminal.
Most of my transactions are below $100, however there are times now, where the weekly shop adds up to more than that. This makes the growth in the available funds permissible on a single contactless transaction to A$200, incredibly beneficial.
Any of my other transactions larger than that, paying bills, larger purchases, are typically done online, which has a much larger limit (usually $1,000 – A$1,500 per day).
Below is the full statement from Visa and you can find the full statement from the Australian Payments Network here.
At Visa, one initiative we have supported is to increase contactless payments PIN limits. We know people want to make contactless payments, and increasing the contactless limit enables them to do so without having to enter their PIN as frequently.
Over the past week, the Australian payments industry, led by AusPayNet, has worked together to temporarily increase the contactless payments PIN limit from $100 to $200.
We applaud the swift action taken by AusPayNet in coordinating the industry to make these changes and we commend financial institutions and merchants for the efforts they have made to implement the required technical changes.
Australians can rest assured that contactless payments experience among the lowest fraud rates of any type of payment and that fraud at the physical point of sale has remained at historically low levels in countries where contactless payments have been widely adopted.
Visa has also been working with financial institutions, merchants, governments and industry bodies in many other countries around the world to increase contactless payments PIN limits, allowing consumers to simply tap to pay with a card, phone or wearable – no PIN required.
We stand ready to support this change, with retailers and our partners in financial services everywhere Visa is accepted, and to work with these partners to determine next steps following this temporary measure.
We often hear our politicians speak about life on the other side of Coronavirus and its certainly going to be different than how we lived in the past. If cash went away, I’d be perfectly fine with that, Australia has done a really great job at upgrading their Eftpos terminals to support tap and pay wherever you go.
Cash = Privacy