Switch/Maestro. When Maestro?

Many EFTPOS terminals now treat Switch as Maestro and the printout reflects this.

Alan

Don't reply to this e-mail address - messages will be deleted unread. To reply to me take away the news and substitute alanc

Oh. I didn't realise this. Does that mean Maestro will now be accepted everywhere Switch is? Don't want to be embarrassed :-)

I think so..............

Alan

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Yes, just today I noticed that in Tescos my card came up as Maestro on the till display.

Without a hint of irony, Jerry astounded uk.finance on 08 Jul 2004 by announcing:

Obviously depends on the retailer. Some have always accepted them. Some perhaps never will.

Without a hint of irony, Alan Norris astounded uk.finance on 08 Jul 2004 by announcing:

No. Not necessarily. Almost certainly, the only thing that's changed is that instead of printing "Switch" on the receipt, it now prints "Maestro". I know for a fact this is all I did to implement the switch (no pun intended) for a major UK retailer.

It looks like there is lack of consistent information here. My Switch card has the Maestro logo, but so has the Solo card I have for a savings account. The card user manual says that they can be used to buy goods overseas wherever I see the Maestro sign, yet some places here, e.g Aldi, won't accept the Solo card, while happy with Switch. The change was portrayed purely as a re-branding, so when the Switch/Solo logos are dropped, what's going to be the difference between the two cards?

Chris

It is utterly confusing, I think. I cannot see the rationale for a separate Solo.

I should have thought that Maestro was closer in concept to Solo than Switch. In my experience (well Italy and Spain mainly, recently) of Maestro it is not unversally accepted in Europe as widely as Visa/Mcard. It occupies a slot similar to Solo here - fairly ubiquitous and more accepted than Electron.

And to confuse matters even more: I have a French bank account, with a MasterCard - but it's a debit card, not a credit card! And yes, they do also offer Maestro cards - I still haven't worked out the differences!

Chris

Yes. My account is Spanish they too offer a Debit MCard. There the difference is Maestro is not credit scored but MCard is (if you are Spanish otherwise E600 deposit).

It looks to me as though Switch is effectively becoming a Solo card and they are keeping the Solo for "marketing" reasons.

Without a hint of irony, Chris astounded uk.finance on 08 Jul 2004 by announcing:

The internal processing, for one. There are 7 different types of Switch card, for instance (making 8 different types of Maestro before you consider Solo which has another few types). Some have 1 digit issue number, some have

2 digits, some have start date instead of issue number, there are 2 different start-date-calculation methods.

For those that already accept these cards, it can be as simple as changing the scheme name on the receipt. For those that don't, they won't necessarily simply start accepting them just because they all have the same name.