AIB Mastercard won't work on tolls in France

APM

Does anyone know why my AIB MC2 Mastercard won't work in any of the Toll Plazas on the road in France, or Spain...?

Seems weird that mine gets rejected but my friend in the same car who has an AIB Visa card works

Davy

Do they accept mastercard?

Toots

AFAIK they accept both. I used my BOI mastercard in France last year and it worked on all the tolls.

APM

Yeah they accept Mastercard. I contact AIB directly myself only the price of the call home would be expensive and they don't seem to have an email address for credit card queries!

Bogger77

I found that while in the States last year, it was 50:50 on my boi mastercard working in shops, while my BOI Visa worked 99% of the time. I'd say the issue is with Tolls payment provider, I work for a company with a big ecommerce site, and we're always running into issues where cards from some random banks arent accepted, and we have to get our payment processor to update their lists

BuffyBot

Is it the shape? The MC2 has a curved corner if I remember correctly. Perhaps the machine is rejecting it because of that.

Mint credit cards in the UK have the same shape and I remember they caused people issues in some machines when they came out.

BuffyBot

I see it's also made of translucent plastic - that may be causing the issue either.

broker2008

I used my AIB Mastercard in tolls in France in February and definitely worked.

dotsman

BuffyBot wrote: »

Is it the shape? The MC2 has a curved corner if I remember correctly. Perhaps the machine is rejecting it because of that.

Mint credit cards in the UK have the same shape and I remember they caused people issues in some machines when they came out.

My guess is that is the problem. When I was a student, I also had an MC2 and had 1 or 2 issues with vending machines etc.

Davy

You would think that a bank would know about the machines the card is used in, and not issue cards like this :rolleyes:

dotsman

Davy wrote: »

You would think that a bank would know about the machines the card is used in, and not issue cards like this :rolleyes:

I'd say it's more the machines than the card to be honest. It does work in 99.9% of machines.

Davy

But if its the missing corner off the card thats causing the problem its hardly the machines fault. The machine must be designed that way like a key to lock is, rather than it actually anything to do with the cards chip.

dotsman

Davy wrote: »

The machine must be designed that way like a key to lock is, rather than it actually anything to do with the cards chip.

Yes, that's correct, it has nothing to do with the chip. It's just bad design of the machines.

As I said, most machines don't discriminate against non-standard cards. It's just the odd few. There's plenty of debit/credit cards out there that have slightly different designs. As long as they maintain the same dimensions (overall), the machine should be able to handle them. Unfortunately the designers of a few machines didn't have this foresight.

eth0_

It's the shape of the card. A friend of mine had this card when he was a student and I remember he couldn't use it in lots of machines where you had to put the card into a slot (as opposed to swiping it). Most famously, the pre-booked ticket collection points in Cineworld.

APM

Yeah I've come to the conclusion that AIB don't care about the cards not working in a good proportion of machines around the world.....next step is to try and get them to issue me a standard shape one (on the student card scheme)

Thanks for the help everyone