This morning I got an extremely annoying email telling me that Google Checkout has stopped accepting Maestro cards and that I should register another type of card to carry on using its services. Actually I was quite angry. Maestro is one of the most common cards in use in the UK and certain banks do not offer an alternative unless you change your account. How many people will change their whole bank account just to use another website?

It was also quite annoying that there was no explanation. After digging around a bit, I did find answers. Apparently Maestro is now insisting that all transactions use SecureCode. This is the system that asks you to use the predefined password when making a purchase. Unfortunately it is really not very secure as you can quite easily reset your password using a date of birth which can be acquired from a whole host of social networking sites, but that is another story.

Verified by Visa, which is the Visa equivalent is still optional. The SecureCode system takes away a lot of the responsibility of the card company covering the cost of fraud as it is much harder to claim that your card was stolen when they also know your password. Google didn’t want to put users through this extra step and probably didn’t want to pay the higher fees and so, to avoid loosing revenue and potentially putting themselves at greater risk of liability in the case of fraud, decided that they could just stop accepting the Maestro and stick with Visa. In the long run, perhaps it is unlikely they will lose much business and have probably calculated they stand to lose less than if they had taken on the more arduous terms MasterCard were imposing. It seems unlikely that they would have inconvenienced so many users without carefully considering it.

It has also been suggested that SecureCode is not compatible with a number of services such as WAP and as such would limit the channels payment could be accepted by. I don’t really accept this as a good reason for dumping the service though as you could just restrict maestro users on that channel and allow everything else, while still allowing us to use the standard web based system as normal.

HSBC are rumoured to be moving over to Visa too. It seems Maestro is not so popular as it used to be. Perhaps the charges have become proportionally uncompetitive. RBS / Natwest will still offer it as standard though. I think it very unlikely anyone will want to move banks. If a significant number of people have to stop using the service, competitors such as PayPal could well take some of Google’s business. In PayPal’s case, you can fund transactions using direct debit, thus avoiding the card issue. IT remains to be seen whether Google too will start offering this service. Personally, I would like this as you could incorporate the correspondence logging system of Google with the convenience of PayPal. In my opinion and through experience, Google checkout offers better customer service.

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