Nationwide put a “hold” on my credit card yesterday due to a transaction from a well known bricks & mortar retailer’s online store (and not one that is about to go bankrupt either).
What I don’t understand is:
- The retailer whose transaction triggered the block is one that I’d bought from several times before using the same credit card. The last time was as recently as October. Why can’t Nationwide use my purchase history?
- Why do I have to wait over 24 hours for my card provider to tell me they’ve blocked my card?
- Nationwide froze my card recently — beginning of November — yet seem not to understand why I consider repeated blocking to be unacceptable.
- Both times they froze my card at the weekend: But their security department is shut (!), so I can’t unblock the card. Why don’t card operators have 24/7 support?
- Putting a “hold” on my card actually stops other transactions rather than putting them on hold! I have to contact each company and ask them to retry payment — Nationwide won’t — and I have to hope that those firms are organised enough to try again. One of them has already tried the payment three times in the last day.
- Amazon appears to have better understanding of my purchase history than my financial institutions. I can go back about five years of transactions there, but a credit card company has trouble with a history of much more than five weeks!
Nationwide isn’t alone here. I had a similar discussion with my previous credit card provider several years ago when they blocked my card due to three online purchases on the same day. That bank has recently been re-capitalised.
Perhaps this is why the financial sector is stuffed?
