On 28/7/22 22:20, Ron Stux wrote:
> Better specify that this means an Australian bank issued card. Luckily
> I brought a few AUD with me on my trip because it was a surprise to
> find I couldn't use my US credit card in the myki machines. No problem
> purchasing the card with the initial top-up at the store at Southern
> Cross station with my US credit card. But the first time I tried to
> top up again - oops.
Turns out while there a 'standards' for authenticating credit cards,
there are too many 'options' and every countries banking system has
different quirks on these options. I've never travelled to the US, but...
Australian 'chip' cards with PINs are not recognised as such in the UK
or France and the terminals fall back to 'signature required' often to
the surprise of the checkout operator. This mean that while we could use
a Visa Debit card to purchase train tickets in France, we had to go to a
window, the vending machines couldn't do a PIN verification with our Aus
cards.
(I have a Visa Debit and a Mastercard Credit (so different providers)
with free international transactions.)
Most UK machines could fall back to 'online' PIN verification but not
all. UK chip-n-pin stores the PIN in a encrypted file on the chip that
the terminals know how to access, so they can do 'offline' verification.
I think the French do as well, but differently to the British (of course).
My Australian cards worked fine on London's Oyster system.
The rise of Apple and Google payment systems using the NFC chips in
phones has pushed the state of this a long way towards some sort of
international harmonisation.
My collection of 'foreign' transit cards will be come collectors items :-)
Tourists not having or nor knowing about Myki shouldn't be an issue
going forward. Any tourist is almost certainly going to have some sort
of contactless payment card backed by a major banking cartel with
international affiliates and partners so the system will accept it.
But not quite there yet.
The laggards in all this are actually the US banks.....