Contactless pay limit rises to €30

FROM the end of this month, shoppers will be able to buy more expensive items using contactless payment after the Government raised the limit from €15 to €30.

The measure is designed to encourage more of us to move away from cash to debit cards, as is the scrapping of the €5 annual Stamp Duty payment on all ATM cards.

From the start of next year the annual payment will be replaced by a charge of 12c per ATM transaction. Minister Michael Noonan promised no consumer will be lose out as a result of the change as the stamp duty will be capped at the existing levels of €2.50 or €5 depending on card type. Charges on debit card transactions will also be banned.

Dermott Jewell of the Consumers’ Association said there’s a lot of trust required for this measures to work. He said: ‘Times have shown that benefits are not passed on by retailers. It is a well-known fact that when the VAT reduc- tion was made [in the hospitality sector] the benefits were not passed on to all consumers.’

In relation to the scrapping of the annual stamp duty charge on ATM cards, Mr Jewell said: ‘I think what consumers will see is that a charge has gone but they don’t understand that a new charge has replaced it because it is a silent charge. You don’t see it, nobody asks you for it, you just see it in your banking statement, so only time will tell.’