The move to virtual money is all well and good when things work, but when they don’t, things can quickly go off the rails, as a reader called Mark discovered recently.
“On September 28th, I got a text about a suspicious transaction from my PTSB current account,” he begins. “Following a call with PTSB, my bank card was cancelled and a new one issued in the post.”
So far, so efficient.
“As I would think is the norm these days, I rarely use my physical card and instead use Apple Pay for the majority of my day-to-day transactions,” he writes.
RM Block
“When my new physical card was issued, PTSB also initiated the process of updating my Apple Pay with my new card – I spotted the card number in my Apple Wallet automatically changed during the week. However, this needed to be activated before use – no instructions were given or available on how to do this.”
When his physical card arrived on October 4th, he went about activating it as instructed. He did this successfully “but noticed that my Apple Pay did not activate”.
He says he rang PTSB twice on October 4th in an effort to get the issue resolved – all in vain, as the card in his Apple Wallet was still not activated.
“Taking matters into my own hands, I deleted the card in my Apple wallet thinking that would resolve the issue and I would simply re-add it as if a new card. Unfortunately this did not work. A further two calls lasting 13 and 15 minutes with Open24 on October 5th followed [but] the issue remained unsolved.”
He was told to try install the card via the PTSB app rather than via Apple wallet “as this allowed me to complete verification within the app. Again this was unsuccessful.
“As per their suggestion, I contacted Apple directly on October 6th who said the issue was with the bank or the card provider (Visa) and that the issue was likely that the card hadn’t been deleted in the back office and when I tried to add the same card, the app returned an error.”
So he called PTSB again and spent another half an hour on hold but still the issue remained unresolved “leaving me without access to my current account on Apple Pay.
“By now I had wasted all my phone credit on calls – and quite frankly mainly listening to hold music. I timed it at three minutes the time it takes to get to speak to an actual human when you ring the Open24 number. At no point did PTSB reach out with updates or to check if my issue had been sorted.”
Then on October 22nd Mark contacted Visa “to see if the issue was on their end but was told it was with the bank. I therefore decided to lodge a complaint on the PTSB website as it appears to be the only way to write to them – despite them continually encouraging you to use the online chat when you ring them.”
After that he was contacted by someone in complaints, “and she was extremely helpful in trying to get to the bottom of my issue. There were two further calls on October 24th and on October 29th (all from PTSB to me) where several different attempts were made to resolve the issue, and I was told to try add the card via my Apple Wallet (contradicting the previous advice given).”
He says that during the second of those calls he confirmed that he still could not add his card and was told that the issue would be escalated.
“Much to my amazement I was also told that a ticket would be raised with IT. I had naturally assumed a ticket was opened already and was baffled to be told that tickets are only raised when standard methods don’t resolve the issue – as had been the case in my experience. So now I write to you, exasperated by the time and effort required to resolve what I would have considered a normal procedure. I am now over a month without my Apply Pay for my day-to-day transactions requiring me to have my physical wallet and card with me which I had gotten out of the habit of doing.”
He says that his “biggest frustration is that the urgency to which they treated my case was only increased because I lodged a complaint with them. I think to myself would I have had any correspondence from PTSB at all if I had not raised the complaint. For a bank whose slogan is ‘Altogether more human’, I can’t help but feel this is the furthest from the truth.
We contacted the company and a spokeswoman said that “due to an isolated issue, the customer’s replacement card details did not correctly update on our system and as a result, impacted the card being loaded to Apple Pay. The issue is now fully resolved. We recognise our service fell short of our usual standards and have apologised sincerely to [Mark] for the inconvenience caused to him.”
