How do I solve a failed PIN payment?

bunq

Hey bunqers 🌈

In this topic we'll list some of the reasons behind a failed PIN payment and how to resolve it.

Wrong PIN 🔑

If the payment is declined because a wrong PIN has been entered, the screen of the terminal and your bunq app will tell you so. In this situation, you should change your card’s PIN which will instantly be updated in our system. However, if you try to pay again right after, a few terminals might not be able to read the updated PIN code on the chip of your card and give you the same error message. In this situation, you should make an ATM transaction to ensure that the PIN code of your card gets updated on the chip of your card as well.

Note: If you entered the wrong PIN code 3 times, you'll need to reset it in the bunq app to complete the payment.

Country isn't allowed 🌍

When you're travelling, it might happen that your card payments get declined because the country you're visiting isn't enabled yet. You can easily change that by adding it to your list of enabled countries or by enabling card payments worldwide. You can see how to do this here.

Card isn't active 💳

In order to be approved, card payments must be done with an active card. This means that if you've just ordered your card and haven't activated it yet or if your card is temporarily frozen, the payment won't go through. In such cases, you should first activate your card before you try to pay again.

Exceeded daily limit 📊

To protect your money, we've set a default daily limit of €1,000 per day that can be adjusted up to €50,000 per day. You can always change it by following the steps presented on this link.

Cash withdrawals 🏧

If you can’t withdraw money at an ATM, you should first check that you haven’t reached your daily limit of €500 set for all bunq cards and keep in mind that the ATM might've its own limit too. Please try withdrawing a lower sum can help you withdraw correctly.

Insufficient balance 💵

When you're trying to pay an amount bigger than the balance on your account, the payment won't go through to make sure you don’t fall into debt.

In this situation, you should top up your account or link your card to another bunq sub-account to complete the payment.

Will there be an error shown on the POS terminal? ❌

When you pay on a POS terminal, errors with different messages can appear on it if the payment fails. Some of them will state the exact reason why this card payment has failed and others will show a different type of error. This might be caused by the card not being accepted by the terminal so we suggest trying another card of yours or try paying with your Google or Apple Pay.