Foreign Perspectives

Whilst I’m sure that many have grown accustomed to having their card declined in recent months due to unannounced and often substantial credit limit reductions, the new HSBC fraud prevention software is sure to increase rejections still further.

As always, where you’re liable to find that your card is declined is when you’re making a transaction that/s outside your normal day to day habits. For example, if you use your card on holiday without telling the bank in advance then it’s much more likely that you will get your transactions rejected from the start rather than after a few days as would have happened previously. Similarly, if it’s a card that you save up for special occasions then you’ll find it rejected when you try to use it.

To avoid serious inconvenience for yourself, it’s best to travel around (at home and abroad) with a minimum of two cards issued by different banks. Worth noting is that some banks issue cards under many different flags so make sure that it really is a different bank that issues your backup card. Don’t forget that you should have a Visa branded and a Mastercard branded card for holiday purposes as not all countries accept both equally.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Related posts:

1. Some good signs on the financial front

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 7th, 2009 at 9:08 pm and is filed under Banking, Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.