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I am someone who uses the pay at pump option when filling up at Tesco, on my online banking statement it will show a pre-authorisation charge of £1, then a couple of day later that charge will drop off and the full cost of the fuel debited, e.g £40
It now seems that things are about to change from reading this BBC article, Asda are starting to trial it, with other supermarkets to follow.
Instead of a £1 pre-authorisation holding amount, it will rise to £99!
Should the £99 amount not be authorised by your bank due to insufficient funds, a further check will be done and lesser amount authorised to equal the available funds you have in your account e.g if you have £40 available you will be able to take £40 of fuel.
I have a concern over this, and it is this.. if i want to fill up £40 of fuel and i have £100 available in my account, the pump will ‘hold’ £99 and not release it till 2 days later (that’s how long my bank holds pre-authorisation amounts, other banks may be shorter or longer), when that money could have been earmarked to pay direct debits the next day.. to which as this money is now on hold, the direct debit is likely to fail and i will incur bank charges and admin charges.
If the pumps can do a secondary check to see what is the actual amount in your bank account and authorise that exact amount, why not make that the primary and only check? That way there would be no holding of excessive amounts of money not earmarked for the pump.
If this trial is successful and rolled out nationwide, I for one will be joining the queues and paying at the kiosk, which will mean longer queues at the pumps unfortunately.
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