Flexible friends

Around 1975 I went to my branch of the Midland Bank and asked them for an Access card. Credit cards were pretty uncommon then. My bank turned me down as one of the great unwashed, a person without a job. There was another bank that offered Access at the time, probably the NatWest, and being persistent I went there to ask about getting a card. They suggested I applied for a Barclaycard instead. So I filled in the form, using a Biro, posted it off to somewhere and, several weeks later, got a nice shiny Barclaycard back.

22nd October  2020 and Barclaycard have just closed down that account. I can't use it after today. Not because I'm in debt but because they are cleaning up their European business before the UK finally abandons the Union. I forget what they told me about why they were closing me down. It was something to do with it becoming more expensive of trickier to do business with Europe when they ceased to be a member of the club.

I've had a Spanish credit card since  about 2006. I remember the people hawking their cards outside the Carrefour supermarket being amazed when I approached them to ask to sign up! At first it was a Spanish Barclaycard but Barclays sold the business on to Banco Popular, later Santander, who then sold a lot of the business to some U.S. risk capital group. It's called a WiZink card nowadays.

In the same way that I have a Spanish credit card I have a Spanish driving licence, pay Spanish taxes, I'm on the equivalent of the Council Tax list and we have a TV aerial which collects the Spanish TV signal. I know though that lots of Britons continue to behave as though they live a couple of thousand kilometres North of here. They have bank cards based on money in British bank accounts, they have British mobile phone numbers, imaginative solutions to watching broadcast British TV, as well as Amazon.co.uk accounts and the NHS still thinks they live in Acacia Avenue when they pop in to see the doctor on their trips "home". There has been an enormous kerfuffle as Britons, who have lived here for years and years, scrabble to get around to changing their driving licences, organising their "right to reside" paperwork and even register as living in the house they live in before the Brexit deadline. The fact that there's an advert on the Spanish Spotify channel advertising someone to sort out paperwork for British immigrants suggests that it's big business.

Apart from the slight twinge of losing something I've had for over 40 years I will miss the card not a bit but I do hope that today's change won't cause anyone here too much of a problem.

Running on fumes

Coming home from Torrevieja on Saturday night the fuel warning light came on on the car. Seventy kilometres of fuel left. Fair enough, we were near the coast, which is pretty built up, and we were on a motorway where there were service stations before our turn off.

Even though the sign on the road said the services were open from 0 hrs. to 24 hrs it was obvious, as we pulled onto the forecourt, that the garage was closed. The pump had a bank card payment facility but it wasn't working. Error message - software failure.

Whilst I dithered about what to do next a man, who had been shouting into his mobile phone in a rather disconcerting way, came over and asked if he could use my phone. His accent was a bit working bloke and it took us a while to tune in to his accent and forthright style. Basically, his car was old and it had lost all its lights. He was unable to continue his journey back to Albacete, about 170kms away, with his wife and kids on board. He'd been trying to phone his insurance company to get either a mechanic or a tow truck but his phone was refusing to work with the 902 number. 902 numbers are those non geographic numbers used by companies and organisations so you don't know where you're phoning - like the 0345 numbers in the UK. They are sometimes not included in call packages. On mobile phones especially they can end up adding a lot to your bill, or eating up your pay as you go credit, as you listen to tiddly pom music, get told about busy operators and how important your call is.

I suspected some sort of ruse from Mr Albacete so, rather than handing over my phone and him running off with it or surreptitiously phoning a sex line in Rwanda, I let him use the hands free inside the car. In the end it turned out to be an absolutely genuine call from a man having a much worse evening than us. As we drove away, he asked that God be kind to us for our generosity.

The Almighty didn't seem to be on hand to help with the fuel problem though. Petrol stations in Spain tend to close at 10pm. There used to be ones with night windows, there may still be, but I suspect that nowadays the tendency is to have a card reader instead. It's been a while since I last needed to refuel at night. We're old you know. We stay at home with cocoa.

We were closeish to Elche and I know that city well enough to know the location of quite a few petrol stations. Big petrol stations. The one in the supermarket said 24 hrs. on the sign. The card reader said it couldn't read my card. The second was closed, the third was behind a system of labyrinthine one way roads that had us going round in circles for ten to fifteen minutes before I gave up. We drove to an industrial estate with more petrol stations. The dashboard display now said we were good for only another 15 kms. I presume the system tends to pessimism but it was, nonetheless, a little worrying. Another big and busy Repsol station was closed as we passed but there were lights on at one of the cheap garages on a service road. And the pump was happy to accept my credit card.

The usual system with credit card pumps, when you want a full tank, is to tap in a higher figure than the value of fuel you expect to need. When you're done the credit card and pump talk to each other and refund the difference. My receipt says something like 70€ credit, 48,33€ served. Just what I'd expect. At the moment though my credit card account shows that I paid 118,33€ for the fuel. I'm sure the refund will come but somehow it seemed like the perfect end to a simple and routine journey home.

I only have plastic

When I lived in the UK I had a lot of credit cards. I made a hobby of moving non existent money between one account and another to try to keep the interest payments down. When I left the UK I cancelled the majority of my plastic but I hung on to a couple for one reason or another. Nowadays I hardly ever use my British plastic but, every time the banks try to take them away, I obstinately hang on to them "just in case".

Every now and again one of the British card issuers sells or buys my account and changes something or other. Barclaycard recently did just that when they terminated an agreement with AMEX. As an incentive to use the new card they offered me a bracelet so that I could make small, contactless payments by simply waving my forearm at the credit card machine. Something to speed up buying the morning latte. Why not I thought? Well, because I live in Spain! I suspect I will never use it.

I was a Barclaycard customer in Spain too. Barclaycard sold their operation to Banco Popular who renamed the card WiZink. The name sounds OK in Spanish, if a bit corny, but rubbish in English. It took ages for the websites and the cards to change after the purchase and WiZink got around to the rebranding just as Banco Popular went belly up. It was bought by Santander for 1€. Strange really; years ago Santander absorbed the bank where I had my Spanish current account.

I use my credit card a fair bit in Spain but I use it in quite an old fashioned way. I use it for decent sized purchases - at a clothes shop, for the big shops in the supermarket, for diesel, for the posh restaurant and for anything online. Even if there were sandwich shops in Spain, and Spaniards cannot understand why we like to mix so many ingredients between two slices of bread, so there aren't, I wouldn't think to buy a sandwich and a coke with plastic. In Spain I use money. I go to a bank machine and take money out of my current account. I then use those notes (and the coins that they spawn) to buy beer, duct tape and similarly useful articles.

I know that Denmark is now more or less cashless. When we were in Hungary a little while ago we were always asked if we wanted to pay with cash or card even when we'd just had a couple of beers. The last time I visited the UK one of the things that struck me was how the tiniest of purchases were made with plastic. I have seen Spaniards pay small amounts on plastic but my impression is that it's not generalised. So I wondered if it's just me that's old fashioned, if it's another of those rural/urban things, if I should catch up and start paying for coffee with virtual money or if there is a real difference between Spain and some other European countries.

The answer seems to be that it's the way that the banks operate that's different, plus a bit of inertia.

Spanish banks now charge for pulling money out of cashpoints that aren't theirs. There are also fewer cashpoints because of the closure and merger of so many offices within the troubled banking sector. As a result, for the first time last year more money was spent on credit and debit cards than in cash. So there is a real increase in the use of plastic.

On the other hand only 16% of all transactions in Spain are made on plastic as against figures of around 50% in Portugal or France. One reason for that may be that only 40% of all Spanish businesses accept plastic. And in turn it seems likely that this low percentage of acceptance is because, historically, Spanish banks charged high commissions to retailers on plastic card transactions. In fact the Government introduced legislation in 2014 that limited the commission that the banks could charge the businesses for each transaction. That included very low percentages on micro purchases. Despite this there are still lots of businesses with the signs up to say that you can't pay amounts of less than so many euros with plastic. The suggestion, in many of the articles that I read, was that Spanish traders don't pay a lot of notice to the blurb sent to them by plastic card companies. As a consequence many businesses are still under the impression that commission charges on plastic transactions are very high and it will be a while before the message gets home.

I should add that when the banks were faced with the loss of income on the commissions charged to traders they responded by charging customers more to hold the cards. I don't pay anything for the maintenance of my UK cards but I pay 36€ a year for my Spanish bank debit card. There's also an annual charge for my credit card but I never pay that as the charge is refunded so long as I spend more than so much per year. Interestingly though the Spanish cards charge a lot less for "foreign" transactions than the British cards.

So it's not something amongst we yokels nor is it simply my misperception. Spaniards really do use plastic less than a lot of other Europeans.