The new Card Lock system by the CBA sure makes your credit card secure – sometimes too secure. What happens when you need to allow authorised recurring payments?
By and large I’m very impressed with the CBA’s new card lock features. I like the security of knowing no-one can make unauthorised purchases on my card (particularly if I’ve put my CC details into online sites of questionable security).
I like that I get an immediate notification from the CBA if a CC payment has been denied on a purchase I am making – often before the vendor notices.
However I recently had my scheduled monthly payment to Amazon for my company’s servers denied – because it’s an online international payment. I called the CBA thinking (hoping) I could just whitelist obviously acceptable payments. The lady assured me it was easy to solve – just turn off the security. Done.
Err, but won’t that make the card insecure again? Well, yes, but you don’t want your company’s servers to go down. So now I’m waiting to hear from Amazon whether they can tell me exactly which (hopefully same) day each month the payment comes out, so I can set a calendar event to make the CC unsecure for that day each month. Not an ideal solution.