Apple Wallet Changes

[Shamino (David C.)]

@Quantumpanda

if my Internet is out, and I call the provider, the first thing they do after verifying me and my location is check for known outages in my area. If I’m in an outage zone, there’s zero value to anyone in having me do basic troubleshooting like power cycling equipment.

Funny you should use this example, because it was precisely this experience that convinced me to never bother calling anyone for tech support.

Years ago, I was a customer of Earthlink DSL. One evening, the Internet went out almost exactly at 1:00am. The modem lights were all on and looking good, but no packets were going anywhere.

I called tech support. The person insisted that I run through 40 minutes of troubleshooting (power cycle the computer, update Windows, disconnect my router and talk directly to the modem, etc.) before escalating the problem to tier 2. Then the tier 2 person made be perform all of the exact same steps a second time (apparently the report from the tier 1 person wasn’t good enough) before finally opening a trouble ticket. At this point it was approaching 3:00am - I was on the phone for over 90 minutes.

I went to bed and found everything up and running fine in the morning. I then checked Earthlink’s system status to learn that this was a scheduled outage for some kind of line maintenance.

Oh, and they never called me back to tell me anything. I assume somebody closed the ticket at some point, but I never got any notification of that either.

At which point, I decided that my personal policy (at least with regard to Internet services) is that if there’s a failure, they have 24 hours to fix it. If they don’t fix it on their own after that, I’m cancelling my subscription. I’m never going to waste my time dealing with incompetent tech support ever again.

[fogcitynative (Norman Gilbert)]

I think you have it correct. Goldman Sachs is only the issuing bank for the Apple Card. They are the ones making the credit granting decisions. But to buy Apple products and not pay interest and also get the 5% Apple Cash rewards requires using the Apple Branded Credit card. Exclusively.

They are not Apple’s Merchant Bank. Don’t know who Apple uses but typically companies use specialized payment processors to handle card transactions. The processors need to be able to interface with all the different credit instruments. Credit, Debit, T&E, etc. they are also the ones handling signature capture, PIN codes, security, suspicious use, etc.

The standard for downtime on the VisaNet authorization network is like a maximum of 3 seconds annually. In other words, the total of all network failures and outages cannot exceed three second per year.

Apple is in violation of the terms of the typical merchant agreement with the major card companies. Why?

Because they use your credit card for identification purposes. Using your card for identification purposes is not permitted. It can only be used for financial transactions. Apple uses the card to ID users for their AppleID lost or stolen password process. So, if you card is ever lost or stolen, and that card is on file with Apple, use the card to do a password reset BEFORE you report it lost of stolen to the issuer. Once your bank tuns off the card, the AppleID system can not longer validate your identity. It took me 32 days to get back into my Apple account after a burglary. Meanwhile every single app purchased via the App Store stopped working, even on the brand new iPhone i bought to replace the one that was stolen…

The Merchant Card agreement is like 30 pages long. For example, if a merchant signs up to accept Visa, they cannot pick and choose which Visa cards they will accept, for example rejecting Rewards cards as the merchant pays more to process them.

Also, a company that accepts credit cards from Visa or MasterCard cannot tell their customers the card is not accepted if it was issued by a foreign bank. Exceptions are countries where it is illegal for Americans to spend money, like Cuba, Yemen or North Korea.

BBVA had a long list of countries where their BBVA issued Visa debit and credit cards could not be used, like Bolivia, Colombia, Serbia. Etc. A few messages to my Senior VP friend at Visa International got that policy rescinded. Funny how fast a CEO backs down when Visa tells him either follow the terms of the agreement or stop issuing our cards. It took about 9 months for visa to investigate and take action. And it was the impetus for Visa creating a reporting site for instances of the card not being usable or accepted where it should be usable or accepted. Not everyone has a friend at Visa and I don’t think she wanted to hear from me if it happened again.

[Quantumpanda (Marquelle D. McKean)]

Adam was the one who brought up Goldman Sachs in this thread, saying that some questions about Apple Pay and Wallet may be answerable only by GS. I too thought that this thread shouldn’t have anything to do with GS, which is why I posed the question.

[xdev (Marc Z)]

@Shamino

The person insisted that I run through 40 minutes of troubleshooting (power cycle the computer, update Windows, disconnect my router and talk directly to the modem, etc.) before escalating the problem to tier 2. Then the tier 2 person made be perform all of the exact same steps a second time

My policy is the first tell them I’ve already done all that. If they insist I do it again, I just pretend to do it. It’s much faster and less stressful and the result is the same.

I also have certain things I refuse to do (like rebooting my computer) that I know are irrelevant (i.e. I can’t get wifi on my phone and my Mac, and they tell me to restart my computer) or Windows-specific actions when I’m on a Mac.

[ace (Adam Engst)]

@Quantumpanda

I thought Goldman Sachs was involved only with the Apple-branded credit card. Does Apple use them as the payment processor for Apple Pay?

Doh! Yes, sorry, as @Shamino intuited, I was mixing two threads in my head. Goldman Sachs is only related to the Apple Card, not to Apple Pay and Wallet.

[ken10 (Ken)]

@Shamino

This is what the law requires. But even if your liability is zero, a credit card is safer.

Why?

If someone uses a debit card to fraudulently drain your bank account, the money is gone. You will get it back (minus what you’re liable for) after the dispute is resolved, but it’s up to your bank whether you’ll see a penny before that.

On the other hand, with a credit card, if someone fraudulently runs up a huge balance, you are not obligated to pay for any disputed charge until the dispute is resolved. No money leaves your account while the dispute is being investigated.

My bank replaced my keycard with a Mastercard Debit and I hadn’t really thought much about that. The worry I now have is that it has a CVV to allow ordering over the internet. I have a daily limit on the cash withdrawals but reading the fine print it seems that this doesn’t apply to internet transactions. Someone I know who had their credit card used fraudulently is certain the details were obtained when it was used in a taxi using a hidden camera. While the credit card from the same bank has lots of security settings the debit has none.

[Shamino (David C.)]

For what it’s worth, I almost never use my debit card except to authenticate ATM transactions and it never leaves my wallet at any other time.

My father is more concerned about debit card fraud than I am. He insisted that his bank issue an ATM card that has no capability to be used as a debit card and they did. If this concerns you as well, you might want to ask your bank if they can do the same for you.

[ken10 (Ken)]

I’m thinking that I will black out the CVV. The debit card has one nice feature, in that I can just tap with it to pay.