Banks stick with the £100 contactless limit

Hello TWIF UK & Europe friends, I've spent the past week in Taipei, Taiwan, where 7-Eleven stores are ubiquitous.

There's one on almost every street corner. Sometimes I've even seen multiple stores on the same street. The card machines in 7-Eleven say "Tap to Pay Only", and with most transactions sub $10 there's little need to enter a PIN. (The contactless limit in Taiwan is NT$3,000, which is around $94).

It got me thinking that despite all the hype we hear about agentic commerce and stablecoins, the workhorse of global payments in the UK, Europe, and much of the world is still the contactless payment card. UK Finance, a trade association, recently reported that 67% of credit and 76% of debit card transactions are now contactless.

With billions of transactions each month, tapping our cards as a means to pay has become second nature to millions of us.

But what’s the right limit for a contactless payment? At what point should a user have to insert their card and enter their PIN number to verify the transaction?

In the past week UK banks decided to hold the contactless payment limit at the level of £100 per transaction. Regulators had said that banks could increase the limit — or remove the limit entirely — but banks have, for now, opted to keep the existing limit in place, citing a lack of consumer demand.

Some banks maintain cumulative limits — such as enter your PIN every five transactions, or once a total level of spend is hit. But such limits can be bypassed altogether by using Apple Pay or Google Pay (verification comes from the on-device biometric, therefore a PIN is not needed).

In reality, lifting the limit would mean more risk at the card issuer level. For the time being you'll need to enter your PIN if you go over £100 on any single transaction. Not such a big deal, but this story reminded me of just how central contactless is in the world of payments.

As I've found out in Taipei, even on the other side of the world it's possible to "Tap to Pay", here with the added choice of paying with card brands such as China UnionPay and JCB. The UX is global. Whether in a 7-Eleven in Asia, or at a supermarket in London, contactless is everywhere.

by Matt Jones