A problem that has long bedeviled me is that I’ve been unable to use my Standard Chartered India debit card to pay for things online. The bank reps will happily tell me that the card should work; the charging service will happily inform me that it got declined. And it’s not like in the States where if you’re having some sort of issue with your debit card you could just walk into a store and pick up prepaid Visa cards for cash; they don’t have them here.
The other day I gave it another shot after activating my Standard Chartered Platinum Debit Card. I tried buying Facebook credits and tried using PayPal to pay for something: both were declined. The bank’s customer service told me that the charges went through: Facebook had charged a dollar and PayPal a rupee. I realized that the charging processes had essentially tried some sort of verification charge after which the card failed after when they tried the whole sum.
I’ll be honest, it was more than a little bothersome; I’m just sick of the issue, sick of not being able to make these little monthly payments on things I need, that I use for work, that I can’t quickly migrate or shut down—domains and servers that I’ve managed to maintain for 7 years, just cause of some random incompatibility somewhere. Certain services (like GoDaddy via their Good As Gold program) will take wire transfers but those take a while and you certainly have to wire more than the $20-sized payments in question here.
So I got to searching for answers online, and eventually found out that the Reserve Bank of India’s 3D-Secure mandate is the problem! They require that payments made online go through an intermediary step such Verified by Visa or MasterCard SecureCode, which many international services haven’t yet implemented.
In the past I’ve come up with stopgap solutions (using a friend’s card or some online service with a card tied to it—Payoneer, for example) but they’re bumpy and quite transient. For example, in January Indian banking authorities asked Payoneer to block its cards.
Left in the lurch (again!) about how to pay for my online services I investigated the possibility of opening an account with a bank that offered virtual credit cards (e.g. HDFC NetSafe) or regular credit cards quickly (Axis Bank for example will offer a credit card against a fixed deposit) but these would require initial deposits, plus days or weeks of turnaround time—and I wasn’t even sure that they’d skip the intermediary step if I tried them online.
One last bout of googling finally delivered a stroke of luck—I found out on a forum that you can use EntroPay (EntroPay) as a virtual credit card provider. I signed up, added funds from my debit card, went through the intermediary Verified by Visa screen to load them and what do you know, it worked! EntroPay provided a virtual Visa card that was processed instantly by mediatemple.
I have to say it’s remarkable how much information is locked up in social networks and online instances of them like forums. Collective experience of people who’re familiar with a context (or have been through a mess!) beats customer service reps, articles, documentation and so forth in figuring out what the hell to do.