Huh, that’s very interesting if so. I wonder how on Earth that works then? I assumed Airtime Rewards basically gave the partnered retailers a list of card numbers to ‘look out for’ and then report back the balance spent in their stores by those customers, so that the appropriate rewards could be calculated and paid out. For them to be able to tell that the physical Chase card, with a totally different number, is linked to the virtual one, there must be some kind of connection with Mastercard’s data (assuming MC have a record of the physical and virtual Chase debit cards being linked to a single customer’s current account, otherwise they’d have to be getting it directly from Chase!). All very curious indeed! Edit: @Seb any ideas on how this might work? I always turn to you for your superior knowledge on banking and payments systems!
As numberless debit cards become more common, I expect we’ll need to see some kind of universally accessible solution so that merchants can recognise that physical and virtual card details are linked (e.g train companies and collecting tickets from machines).
@Amazon_Parcel is the 10+ days for the Chase transactions to show up unusually long compared to your other cards?
Yep, no Tesco offer for me either Thanks for finding that Tweet explaining it @Mathew - hopefully they expand it to all customers in the future, although with how aggressively they’re pushing Clubcard at the moment I’m not sure they’ll be too keen on adding an additional layer of loyalty scheme.
Mastercard have a system called MDES (Mastercard Digital Enablement Service) which allows for “tokens” to be created, linked to a cardholder’s real card number in the Mastercard system. These extra numbers generated as part of the tokenisation are also recognised by the bank as “the same” account, but generally merchants don’t see that (the whole point, in many ways, was to limit their data).
I suspect that a version of this tokenisation, originally designed for digital wallets, is being used for the numberless card. I imagine that, for the partner retailers, this works similarly to Flux. They likely give Airtime Rewards data on everyone who has shopped with them, including their full card number. Airtime then “sift” this data to identify which customers have signed up to Airtime Rewards and which haven’t. This must involve putting the data through Mastercard’s system at some stage, to see if they get a match on a tokenised card number.
Certain merchants are allowed to “reverse the tokenisation” and see the real card number on an account in order to match up these sorts of things. TfL, for example, can do it (although they don’t generally so you still pay a penalty fare if you tap in and out with different devices). Having checked the number as part of this reconciliation process, Airtime would know that you are their customer and be able to match the transaction.
Amazing, knew you’d be able to shed light on it! Thank you
From what I’ve heard, TfL also aren’t matching the physical Chase card with the virtual numbers, so you can’t view your physical card’s travel history in the TfL app, which is a shame now knowing that they totally have the capability to do it.
They don’t routinely do it because if they did you could travel with other people (one paying contactless, one Apple Pay, one something else) and it would be too open to abuse as the system would probably count them all as the same thing and you would only pay for one daily-capped fare.
But if you say “I tapped in with Apple Pay and then my phone battery died so I tapped out with my contactless card” they can see it is actually the same card number on the underlying system if they check it so they can “verify” to an extent that your story is genuine. This allows you to get a penalty fare refunded if you need to and contact customer services.
I’ve always used Oyster (railcard discount!) so I don’t actually know, but if you add, for example, your Starling debit card to the TfL app and then complete a journey using Apple Pay, doesn’t TfL still match the Apple Pay journey to your underlying card and display it in your history (despite Apple Pay presenting a different number), using the reverse tokenisation you described earlier? It’s this kind of retrospective matching that I’d like them to do for Chase, otherwise there’s no way of people viewing their physical card’s journey history. I’m not suggesting they allow for a journey to be started using one method (eg physical card) and ended using another (eg Apple Pay).
Got it, and I must say I have thought to myself before ‘why on Earth won’t they just let me tap out with my watch if my phone dies,’ but now you’ve explained it! So basically a contactless daily or weekly cap only applies to that single form of payment; i.e. if I hit a daily cap using my Starling card on my iPhone’s Apple Pay, a journey made with my physical Starling card would be treated as a separate card - despite TfL being aware of the common underlying card - and will be charged in full?
I believe so, although I’ve never tested it as I’m rarely in London and, when I am, if I hit the fare cap it’s not in my interest to continue paying via an “alternative” method!
PS: I should add, the details of the way the system works are not fully documented, presumably to avoid any reverse-engineering which might allow people to exploit loopholes.
So that is all based on my understanding of how it works, and not any official sources. I don’t work for TfL or anything like that, so have no “insider knowledge”.
I use Chase through Curve and my rewards are tracked. And for airtime rewards I have my Chase and Curve cards both registered. So whatever way I choose to pay, it tracks