Words About Travel

[UPDATE 30/8/2015 – click here for a more recent post about Irish cards being blocked when abroad]

We made the discovery of this new withdrawl limit on AIB debit cards abroad, while attempting to take out our usual amount of money on our AIB debit card at an ATM machine in Chiang Rai, Thailand to cover the next couple of days and were declined payment of our usual amount. We then tried to use ATMs of several different Thai banks and got the same errors until we got to a very low amount of under E100 and suddenly the money came out.

As we were sure the balance in our accounts was not the issue and we had taken out an amount a lot higher than E100 several days earlier, we checked the AIB website. After some searching on the internet and AIBs website we found the following information on the AIB site:

Use your card for cash withdrawals from ATMs in Ireland and worldwide (up to a daily limit of EUR600) where the Banklink/LINK/Maestro symbol is displayed. Please note: at some ATM’s abroad, particularly in non-European locations, the daily cash withdrawal limit may be reduced to EUR100 or less.

This unclear and vague statement is the only piece of information to be found on their website and no other notice has been provided by them on any other system – not even on 0nline banking. At least we did understand that we are in a country that seems to be affected by the E100 limit (Thailand), but as we will be traveling to several other countries, this limit makes a barely workable solution for us for the following reasons:

1. It will be costing us on average 3% more on each transaction in Fees (All Thai ATMs impose a 150Baht or ~E3.75 for each foreign debit card ATM transaction no matter how small). This is multiplied by 3 again as we have to make up to 3 times the amount of transactions to get the same amount of cash which means that we lose an extra 9% on fees to Thai banks for withdrawing the same amount of money and  we lose another 1 or 2% due to the minimum fees imposed by AIB…
2. We will have to go to bank machines daily and take out maximums on both our cards for several days before we can make any additional purchases or go to a remote area where ATMs are not available
3. We will have to walk around with more cash money to have cover any eventualities as we can not take it out when something happens. Or having to take out money out of an ATM on a credit card which has a limit 250E and is even more costly to use abroad.

In our case the damage done by this careless change is costly and very inconvenient but manageable. However, we are sure that there are many travelers with Irish bank accounts abroad who might run into major difficulties due to this decreased withdrawl limit that was imposed without any notice.

Of course we called AIB to get this clarified further and see if there was a possibility to change this or ways around this. The friendly but tired employee at phone banking told us that indeed this limit has been lowered from maximum E250,- (which is already half of what can be taken out with for instance a debit card of several Dutch banks we are aware of) to E100,-. This has been done for any bank that does not use Chip/Pin verification due to a high level of fraud around the world. The bank employee added that this was “A change made by Irish banks” but did not clarify which other banks are also imposing this. When asking about alternatives to take out more money than the new daily limit she basically admitted that this cannot be done using the banks services and that many people that are affected by this change have already contacted the bank.

Out of curiosity and because we are also planning to go to other more expensive countries like Australia we looked into which banks do use PIN/chip verification. As far as we can find, outside of Europe only some banks in Canada use the pin/chip verification method. In short this indicates that your debit card is now pretty much useless as a main source of money outside the EU.

CONGRATULATIONS AIB and the Irish banks who participate in lowering the daily limits on their debit cards to this unacceptable amount without notice. By avoiding your responsibility to deal with the debit card fraud cases and letting the insurance companies do what they are designed for, but instead removing access for your Irish customers abroad to the bulk of their funds… You have SUCCEEDED TO LOWER OUR CONFIDENCE IN YOUR SERVICE ONCE AGAIN….

To all affected Irish citizens abroad in the US/Australia and other affected countries. If you run in to problems due to this unannounced change. Please file complaints with AIB and also write an email to alert@aib.ie/or your affected bank. Also write in or call in a complaint to the financial regulator.