Apple Pay declined at Sainsburys (UK)

Hi,

I have an iPhone 7 Plus with three cards loaded for Apple Pay - a Barclays credit card, a NatWest Credit Card and a NatWest debit card.

I have been using the NatWest debit card to pay for my weekly shop at Sainsburys supermarket every weekend since they first installed Contactless (with Apple Pay support for payments > £30) back in February 2017. Transaction value is pretty much always > £100.

I had no problems with payment until a few weeks ago when a payment was declined - and since then payments have been declined every weekend but one when value was < £50.

I have discussed at great length with my bank and the transaction is not being declined by them. (They get a notification of decline - but the actual decline is happening the transaction reaches them - and they get nothing that tells them why it was declined).

When a payment using the debit card is declined I switch to the Barclays credit card and it goes straight through. So it's not a device problem or a problem with the terminals in store.

I have also talked to the retailer and they can see no problem either but have passed the query onto their Payment Processor - that was two weeks ago and not had any response yet.

I don't really expect anyone to have a solution to this :-) but I thought I'd document it here to share with others and to see if anyone else has had a similar problem and so I can (hopefully) share the solution when I eventually find it.

Thanks,

Brian