Hey bunqers 🌈
Sometimes when you do a card payment, the payment gets pre-authorized. What does that mean? Read all about it below 🙌
What is a pre-authorized payment?
The pre-authorization is an acknowledgement to the merchant that the account has sufficient funds and a reservation for a certain amount of money was successful. Therefore, the pre-authorization isn’t a finalized payment - your funds didn’t leave your account yet, but they were reserved for the merchant. Keep in mind that when you do a pre-authorization the amount is still deducted from your Bank Account, so that you can get a real overview of your balance.
How does pre-authorization work?
When you're done with the payment, the merchant should notify bunq within 20 minutes (for Europe) or within 1 hour (US/Canada) in regards to the payment event.
The authorization is rarely delayed to a couple of hours, where the finalization message isn’t sent to us (especially in credit card based countries). In this case, we adjust the transaction amount only after receiving the request, which can take up to a few days.
Once the pre-authorization is done, the merchant has to settle the exact amount (a.k.a proceed with the payment and claim the reserved funds from your account). Once they claim the funds - the payment has been successfully done. If the transaction wasn’t complete for a different reason, and the period of 7 or 30 days (depending on the merchant) has passed, you can request a chargeback by following the steps mentioned here and we'll reverse the amount.
What should I do if the payment doesn’t proceed within an hour?
The best advice is to always wait for the payment to get authorized as per the steps explained above. If you have any issues with the payment, make sure to contact the merchant first as explained here and request a chargeback as explained here 👀
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