Hey! Any news about the issue with Visa cards and Google Pay. I still can’t add my Visa cards in Google Pay (Standard & Premium cards) but I could successfully add my Metal Visa card (Greece).
Also I found out that all cards issued for Greece have GB BIN number except from the virtual cards.
Public online BIN checkers rely on third party databases and don’t always reflect the correct BIN allocation. Some of my Revolut cards show up there as US cards, but not a single merchant or ATM in the EU has offered me USD currency conversion, which is a sign that they do not recognise the card as issued in the US.
A more reliable test would be an ATM. Does it prompt currency exchange because it thinks it’s a UK card? Also, when an issuer uses new BIN ranges, it might take a while until the information is propagated throughout the worldwide networks of payment service providers.
I haven’t tried it to an ATM because I don’t use cash. My first card was a UK one and the fact is that it didn’t ask for conversion to almost all POS transactions, except from one’s Greek bank POS terminals. So it was recognized as a UK card.
This is something I have found out recently. All my premiums cards in the past came with GR BIN, now the come with UK BIN. I agree that these databases maybe outdated but I have tested many more bank cards and they are indeed issued in the country binlist says. For example, in Greece you could add Monese cards before the launch of the service because all cards here come with a French BIN. Another example, Vivid bank sends German cards to Greece. So it’s not something strange.
I found the most relatable way to test is Apple. I am assuming you’re not an Apple user so this might not work for you. Apple uses the card region to verify the region of the account holder for digital rights management in its media stores. And they are also relying on service providers that seem to have this data relatively up to date.
When I use online BIN checkers, my various Revolut cards are all over the place, UK, US, anything really. But they all work with iTunes and Apple Pay. So Apple does recognise them correctly. (Because when I try to add an actual UK card, this card is denied because of this.)
I am not surprised that Vivid doesn’t issue localised cards at the moment, they only localised their product for Germany and France at the moment, as far as I know. They are in a very early stage of rolling out to other European markets. I wouldn’t read too much into that.
Cards from other issuers really don’t tell you anything about what another issuer does. If, for example, Revolut uses a new BIN range for a relatively short time and Monzo uses its range for longer, a BIN checker might show up to date data for Monzo but not Revolut.
Amazon for example is known for updating their databases very slow. When Tomorrow and Vivid started issuing their Visa cards in Germany, customers couldn’t add their cards on Amazon because Amazon claimed they were Saudi Arabian or something. The card issuers had to get in contact with Amazon to resolve this.
