The Lemon Fool

My Nationwide credit card payment for car insurance with Aviva failed although the car tax went through correctly just 5 minutes earlier.

Eventually I ring NW about it and they tell me "certain merchants have a security block which prevents authorisation".

(She also added certain amounts raise suspicions too.)

After convincing her that it was a valid transaction by me to tax and insure my car she said she would mark it "valid"!

What is wrong with Aviva? Are they happy to be blocked by NW CC payments?

What about the other affected merchants and suppliers?

I recently had a similar problem with Aviva. My house insurance was due to autorenew, but the cc held on file was "close" to its max (0% card till June), so tried to change it, first to an Amex card (failed with a message about not being able to change card, eventually realised they do not accept Amex cards), so tried to change it to my M&S Mastercard, this failed authentication. Decided to just renew with the card on file and cancelled autorenew for next year (btw do not rememember "ticking" autorenew in the first place). Wonder what happens next year?

I recently used Aviva for my parents home insurance and had no problem paying with a Nationwide CC. You have to untick the auto-renew option which is set on by default.

feder1 wrote:My Nationwide credit card payment for car insurance with Aviva failed although the car tax went through correctly just 5 minutes earlier.

Eventually I ring NW about it and they tell me "certain merchants have a security block which prevents authorisation".

(She also added certain amounts raise suspicions too.)

Sounds like the sort of platitudes that customer services staff are taught to spout at anyone with a query like yours, and probably completely unrelated to Aviva.

Scott.

A late reply to this topic but worth adding....

In the last few months my Nationwide card has often not worked for payments which have been fine in the past. I've often (embarrassingly) had to use a different card. Rejections include contactless and sometimes even card+pin payments in my local supermarket and online purchases from major retailers.

I've had no trouble making large payments to Aviva from Barclays in recent months, whether for insurance or moving investment money around.

I think Nationwide are the source of the problem. I'm not a great fan of Nationwide - maybe they have good rates often but their underlying service is poor to mediocre. It's only the potential hassle of moving the account that deters me from changing.

On the other hand, I've generally found Barclays (my other bank account) to be quite good for service and reliability but mediocre for product competitiveness.

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i purchased some house insurance today on the nationwide website .

it declined payment for this from three different credit cards .

i had to pay by debit card .

Could it be that the transaction counts as a cash withdrawal and incurs associated charges/interest on a creditcard?

Quite a few years back (before the days of online banking) I took out travel insurance on a credit card. When my statement arrived it showed as a cash transaction with all the costs thereof. I had to pursue the matter with customer services, and insist that it was unfair to spring this on me without warning - I would of course have used other means to pay if I'd known.

I expect the industry got fed up with that conversation, and unhappy customers.