Eftpos customers warned of potential New Year’s Eve chaos

Customers of Australia’s major banks are being urged to manually update their mobile wallets to avoid a looming technical issue that may cause payments chaos on New Year’s Eve.

An automatic update is currently being rolled out to the 19.1 million Eftpos cards on mobile wallets, including Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay, to ensure they’ll be able to continue to make payments from January 1, 2025.

However, about 60,000 of those cards have a token expiry date of December 31 and will not be automatically updated, sparking concerns that cardholders will be unable to make payments from January 1 onwards. Such a scenario could see customers potentially unable to pay for a round of drinks on New Year’s Eve, for example, or a taxi home.

The issue has drawn comparisons to the infamous Y2K bug, albeit at a much smaller scale. That issue, also known as the “Millennium Bug”, was predicted to wreak havoc on computer systems globally but was largely avoided in part because of pre-emptive action and upgrades.

The bank update only applies to customers who have added a debit card to their mobile wallet before July 2023; have turned on the option to send transactions via Eftpos; and use an Eftpos-only debit card.

Lynn Kraus, CEO of Australian Payments Plus, apologised for the issue and urged affected customers to apply the update themselves by removing and re-adding their card to their mobile wallet.

“Even though this could impact only a minority of consumers with Eftpos debit cards in their mobile wallet, we are acting now out of an abundance of caution as it is an extremely busy time of year for payments, and for those who won’t be able to complete a payment, it will matter,” she said.

“On behalf of Australian Payments Plus I apologise to anyone who might be impacted by this.”