There may be some change here. I, or my insurers, have just had a problem with regular payment of an annual premium being rejected because the original card expiry date had passed. This seemed to take the insurers by surprise - I think they had previously relied on using a continuous authority.
I'm thinking of something along the lines of a phone contract where you agree to pay monthly line rental for at least N months. You would not be allowed to cancel before the time is up.
Surely you *could* cancel, but then you would simply have a liability to some sort of penalty (eg remaining payments in the period would still be owed). This penalty would not have to be paid under the terms of the contract (by CC CA), because the contract is no longer in force, but would still be a debt...?
I doubt it's as simple as that. You can't terminate the contract prematurely because the contract doesn't give you that right (unless the other party is in breach of it). At best, then, you could breach it, in which case they would be entitled to sue for compensation.
The compensation should put them in the same position as that in which they'd have been had you not breached it. Part of that position is the convenience of being able to take payments by CCA. Losing that convenience puts them in a worse position, and so compensation would need to be increased, which means you'd have to pay them *more than* you owe them in order to "buy yourself out" of the deal.
That would be counterproductive but, I concede, possible.
I would argue that *whenever* some party breaches a contract, the other party will *always* be in a "less convenient" position than they were in previously.
Anyway, how would you value the "extra inconvenience" from taking payment, (say) by cheque - rather than CCA?
Also, if the other party was to pay compensation as a direct transfer into the 1st party's bank account, wouldn't that actually be *less* inconvenient (no need for an explicit request from 1st party to the other party's CC company) -- and thus require *lower* compensation??
A realistic figure for the cost of the extra unplanned admin involved.
Not necessarily. Someone would need to dive in there and match up the payment to the account of the party concerned. It is this matching effort, after all, which becomes redundant if the merchant pulls their customers's money instead of sitting back passively and waiting for the customers to push it.
I would have thought that unscrupulous merchants would be "fly-by-night" merchants, *intending* not to stay around for very long, and aiming to change name/address/contact details very frequently. In that case, they wouldn't mind being reported - by the time any real effect comes out of the report, they will have long-time flitted to another outfit/city....
In which case the risk is carried by the card company, who would be unable to produce evidence that the transactions had been authorised by the customer, as the only people capable of supplying said evidence would be the flown fly-by-nighters.
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