My Experience With Adding BMO & TD Cards To Apple Pay
Yesterday, the news came out that Apple Pay was coming to the rest of Canada’s big five banks today. So being the early adopter that I am, I decided to add my TD Canada Trust Interac Access Card and my BMO MasterCard to Apple Pay which already had my CIBC Advantage Debit Card in it. Doing the latter was very quick and easy as I detailed here. But adding the BMO and TD Canada Trust cards was a challenge.
Let me start with BMO. I was able to add my MasterCard easily enough, but when you need to verify the card in one of two ways:
- Via the BMO app
- Via telephone
I tried the former first and after installing the app, it asked me for my card number and my password. I didn’t have a password so I went with the phone option. I should note that BMO has a dedicated number and group of people set up specifically to deal with Apple Pay inquiries which I applaud as that’s going to provide the best customer experience in the long term. After waiting on hold for 11 minutes, which is understandable as this is day one for Apple Pay, and being asked a couple of security questions, it was activated for use with Apple Pay.
Now that wasn’t so bad. But adding the TD Canada Trust card was bad. When I tried to add my Interac Access Card, it said that it wasn’t supported by my bank. This is despite the fact that the card type is listed on this website as being supported. So I decided to give them a call. Now TD Canada Trust does not have a separate group to handle Apple Pay inquiries like BMO does. So I picked the mobile banking options as that seemed to be the logical place to go. After being on hold for 15 minutes, I discovered that due to the fact that the Interac Access Card that I have only has the joint savings account that my wife and I have on it, it won’t work. It actually needs a chequing account to work. This also explains why “tap to pay” won’t work on this card as well. By contrast, my wife was able to add her TD Canada Trust Visa and Interac Access Cards to Apple Pay easily after being on hold for 15 minutes with them to verify the addition of the cards. Now I am not going to lose sleep over this as the cards that I need are now on Apple Pay. But this should be documented someplace so that you’re aware up front that you might not be able to use Apple Pay.
How are you finding Apple Pay now that it’s in Canada. I’d love to know what your experience is like. If you want to share your experience, please leave a comment below.
March 21, 2019 at 8:09 am
BMO is way better than TD in terms of adding the card to ApplePay.
March 21, 2019 at 8:14 am
no issues for adding BMO MasterCard to ApplePay. But a very frustrated experience for adding TD Visa. Here is what I had:
1) used to have a different TD Visa card that was put on ApplePay for some time; 2) TD replaced the old card and issued me the VISA Rewards card (different card number); 3) I deleted the old TD card from ApplePay and attempted to add in the new card for the last 5 days, after 3-4 calls to TD support and visited the Apple Store in person, both sides saying nothing wrong on their sides…. The result is that I cannot add the TD Visa card to ApplePay.
June 6, 2020 at 7:47 am
I had no problem adding the BMO Mastercard to the app, however the verification process is not good. Not able to verify through the app, had to call for verification and am not able to remove the notice for me to verity the card. I will only look at that dot for another day or two if I cannot figure out how to let my phone know that it has been verified and I will delete that credit card from my wallet.