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by reaperducer 547 days ago
Unlike Visa and Mastercard, I noticed that AMEX transaction notifications are near-instantaneous. There is something so magical about a notification popping up on my phone/watch literally the second i swipe a card. I always wondered about the layers on the stack which V/MC must have which AMEX doesnt.

Must be your bank, because both my Visa and MasterCard ping my phone instantaneously, too.
2 comments
kdmtctl 547 days ago
Some smaller banks upload available balances to processors and perform clearing later in a back office only. They just don't have a hook to link a notification and send it only after the actual settlement.
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TuringNYC 547 days ago
>> Must be your bank, because both my Visa and MasterCard ping my phone instantaneously, too.

Well thats sort of the thing...with Visa and MC, there is an extra layer or two of the bank or Fidelity Information Services. With Amex, they own the full stack end to end.

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akira2501 547 days ago
Your card limit gets checked on every transaction. There doesn't seem to be a technical reason why information flow back to me should be limited in any way. If the extra layer fails to work the transaction fails to pass.
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mschuster91 546 days ago
> Your card limit gets checked on every transaction.

Nope. The merchant can choose the level of verification - in some cases, like copying the card with an imprinter [1] or running phone transactions (yes, that is possible - it's called MOTO [2]), it's obviously impossible to check card limits.

Downside of CNP transactions is, the merchant is fully liable for anything from fraud over chargebacks to exceeding limits.

And then you got card-present transactions but the network connectivity is down for whatever reasons... been a while since I messed with that, but at least for German cards you could configure the terminal to store the account details for later submission when connectivity was restored.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_imprinter

[2] https://docs.adyen.com/point-of-sale/mail-and-telephone-orde...

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ErneX 546 days ago
I remember being charged after a while when paying for bus/metro tickets in some places, I think those machines process transactions by batches or something.
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