There was recently a problem with the payment mechanisms that allows cards to work. Cards use a technology maintained by Bankserv to basically clear the payment of an amount from one account to another. You swipe your card, the system then handles the payment from your account to the shop you swiped in. This system recently failed quite seriously. You would swipe your card only to have the transaction declined, yet the money was coming off the card. So what were the effects?

• Embarrassed customers
• Embarrassed retailers
• An administrative nightmare

Bankserv technology went down and stopped working the way that it should. Cashiers were getting cards declined and then trying to swipe them again. Every swipe was coming back to the retailer marked as declined regardless of how much money was actually in that account, and the clincher was when all of those declines had the money they were for actually removed from consumer accounts. This means that you may have paid two or even three times for your lunch that you could not even get as your transaction was declined and the retailer can't give goods away for free, even though in reality you had paid for it.

This lead to embarrassed customers and retailers. The commercial banks were then inundated with requests to fix the problem but had not been informed by Bankserv that there was an issue with their technology. A wave of angry customers descended on the commercial banks and uninformed bank staff did not respond in a helpful manner. More than a week later the banks and Bankserv are correcting the errors, manually, so you should get your money back, but check your account to make sure and then contact your bank if you think that you were wrongly declined and then charged. If you felt let down by your bank you can compare banks and swap and change.