This is a trend in the UK. Gas stations are slow with implementing a Visa guideline that pay-at-the-pump stations should pre-authorize before some can get gas. As a reaction to stations failing to update their systems, various banks blocked pumps for debit card customers that do not have an overdraft allowance.
As a prepaid card, it makes sense that Revolut does protect its accounts against negative balances.
But I believe there is no reason to block gas stations in general like they are doing it now. A vast number of gas stations in other countries already do a pre-authorization. They block a certain amount on the card and then allow to spend this on gas. Their terminals are online. And work perfectly fine with other prepaid cards. This is just a very UK centric solution that unnecessarily limits the acceptance of the card for hundreds of thousands of their customers that are used to âmodernâ self service gas stations for decades now.
I can confirm for you that Revolut does block all pay-at-pump transactions even when they do a pre-authorization as you describe. It makes no sense, but probably has some technical reason as they canât distinguish between those types of transactions and just block the type completely.
Doesnât the article I linked suggest otherwise? From this table, it seems only Santander also blocks all pumps while other issuers only block the not updated ones that do not pre-authorize. So it should be possible to distinguish between them, in principle.
I donât know the technical details and whether this behaves the same everywhere with this payment type, so I assume they have a good reason, considering they found it important enough to only block this specific type of transaction and to even send you a push notification saying âPay insideâ⌠which kind of works, in case there is an inside and youâre not at a fully-automated pump station without any attendant.
Well, this is the ideas section and the suggestion is that they make their card more useful for many of their consumers by addressing this. They are already limiting their card to online use, itâs not working on a plane for example, which is a different discussion.
So my idea is that they are going to improve their product and whatever is necessary to be on par with the majority of UK banks and competing prepaid card issuers here so that the card can be used for gas pumps that offer pre-authorization.
I think is time for revolut to fix this issue, every prepaid MasterCard i have from several issuers (Payonner , transferwise and more) is fully compatible with pre-authorize gas stations.
N26 is a debit card, not prepaid, though. It allows offline payments. I understand that Revolut doesnât allow offline authorizations, but many gas stations are online terminals now that preauthorize. There is zero risk.
I preauthorised gas/petrol with Revolut in the USA earlier this month, and used Revolut on flights. In fact Revolut saved my sanity on this trip I would have been really stuck without it. The only place where Revolut-via-Google-Pay worked though was McDonalds everywhere else just forget it. Also weird was chip-n-PIN without the PIN, just put card in slot get debited. I thought that was impossible.
Visa proposed a while back that all gas (for our UK readers: petrol) pumps should have implemented proper pre-ahtuorization by now. Some providers havenât done this yet. Since some form of unauthorized payment settlement is possible even with cards that are configured for online authorization only, Revolut might have blocked the merchant code to make sure this doesnât happen with UK petrol pumps (that might be configured this way).
If payment at an unmanned gas station in the US was possible, it might be due to a different merchant code or due to a change in Revolutâs configuration.
I remember a couple of years ago not being able to use Revolut on a BA European flight so I stopped trying. November 2017 though I was on Polish LOT airlines London-Warsaw and they only accepted US Dollars or Euros cash, which I thought was weird but hey. Having neither but wanting to spend 5 zloty on a can of pepsi I tried Revolut and it was no problem. Since then I have always paid with Revolut on flights.
Some airlines uses âCard not presentâ. Which saves the transaction on the machine until it is online again. And then do the transaction online. So it is delayed really. But yeah it does count as offline.
Norwegian does the same. There I used a pin and chip too. However it took 5 days before the transaction was done (assuming that was when they offloaded the card machine)
