How to pay a Sterling invoice?

I use Wise all the time. Incredibly efficient as a transferer of funds. And I’m sure Revolut is as good. But I would not use them as a BANK. That’s my point.

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I don’t keep large amounts in my Wise sterling & euro accounts. But one useful application I have discovered is to save the Wise card on Apple Pay.
Rightly or wrongly, I’m reluctant to use Apple Pay to store a card that’s linked to my main bank account. But if anyone hacks the Wise account, they can’t take out more than (the fairly small amount) I’ve put in it.

I resisted Apple Pay for a while. But then recently I had 3 experiences in close succession where I needed to get a rail or coach ticket at the last minute. One was at Montparnasse station (where the machine didn’t work and the so-called ticket office was merely offering to help customers buy tickets on their phones), another was at a small unmanned station in Alsace (where I couldn’t read the screen on the ticket machine because of the sun and the train was due any minute). And the third was when running to catch the Dublin airport bus to Belfast, when I arrived at the stop with only minutes to spare. To discover there was no ticket machine and the driver (working for a relative newcomer on this route) wasn’t supposed to accept cash or cards.

The only option was to buy a ticket on my phone and Apple Pay was much faster and less cumbersome than fumbling around in a busy public place for my bank card and then stabbing in the numbers on my phone.

Yes I do that too (and also with my “normal” UK bank card).

Apple Pay is pretty secure as it uses Face ID.

I’ve just read a little snippet that makes me less than convinced that solely relying on biometrics is that great an idea.
For years we’ve been told that multi-factor authentication is the only secure way e.g. a combination of something you know (password), something you have (a token) and/or something you are (biometric).

I’m still pondering over it, but there’s a suggestion that we’ve replaced one method of single factor authentication (password) with another single factor (biometric).
We might think that no one else has our face or fingerprint but much depends on how fuzzy the match needs to be as too much discrimination would make things frustrating if the match is rejected too often.
The other point is that we’re back to a single attack vector where flaws in the biometric implementation can be exploited.

Anyway, that’s my Sunday morning cogitation. :blush:

The only system I really feel safe with is the card reader. But obviously that’s not an option with Apple Pay so I just make sure not to save any card linked to my main bank account on the phone.
If a criminal clears out my Wise account, it wouldn’t be disastrous.