Starling to allow users to set own contactless limit

Banking
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This felt like it was veering off into another territory to the thread already on the £100 contactless limit.

Starling have confirmed to customers on Twitter and also detailed the same to me via DM that they aim to allow customers to set their limit, subject to the maximum and it will be released and available as soon as they’re ready.

I think this is great and innovative. Mobile wallets are fine as every contactless transaction has to be authorised by yourself directly. However, I really feel very uneasy about a £100 limit on the card. When you think it started at £10!

This could be catastrophic for somebody if they lost their card as not everybody is trustworthy out there and the amount of hassle and admin it could take to try and get the money back, especially if they are on a low income.

I really do applaud Starling for this, and this is the sort of thing why I am glad I now do all my day to day banking through them.

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You can already disable card present transactions, but the added option to set the contactless limit for card present is a decent one. Gives you options in the best of both worlds.

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I know you can do that, but doesn’t it disable both chip and pin and contactless at the same time? I really am glad they are doing this with the contactless limit, for me personally I’d probably set It around £30.

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Anne talked about this in March:

CEO and founder of Starling Bank Anne Boden said: "With a £100 limit, we would like to give Starling customers the chance to opt-out and use a lower limit if they want. We would build this capability into the app.”

“Our customers are increasingly using mobile wallets as a preferred payment method over contactless payments by card. In fact, they are three times more likely to use their mobile wallet than to pay by contactless, especially given the higher limits and added security this gives them.”

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Yeah both are card present. It was just as you mentioned losing your card as one of the examples.

Something to note as well, as far as I can see this is only increasing the per transaction limit to £100. This risk hasn’t significantly changed. You still have a total contactless limit of £135 or 5 transactions before having to authenticate.

The question is are starling implementing a limit on total transaction before re-authentication or is it just a per transaction limit which won’t change the ability for someone to spend up to £135

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I don’t think that’s true. I think the total limit is being raised too (to around £300, I think)

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I haven’t found the answer to that yet because apparently news companies don’t like providing detailed and complete information :expressionless:

So all I’ve found to far is that the per transaction amount is increasing

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That’s not as bad as I bought. I presumed it would be five transactions of £100.

I’m just presuming that if this ever happened to me I’d be refunded anyway.

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Found it

Thanks @nanos , £300 was the key to finding the full information

This PS also confirms that Article 11 of the SCA-RTS will be amended so that strong customer authentication is not required for single contactless transactions up to the value of £100 per transaction. In addition, the amendments to Article 11 of the SCA-RTS confirm the cumulative transaction threshold increases from £130 to £300.

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Apparently the British banks only implement the amount-based limit and not the number of transactions one, to make it easier?

And I see you found the FCA press release, which does confirm the £300 cumulative limit.

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Wouldn’t surprise me. Seen a number of customers who were very confused when tapping their card that they had to put it in, they must have put quite a few transactions on them, otherwise they’d have found it natural to do.

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