Background: UK user with an Amex card on apple pay, just upgraded last week from 14 pro max (worked fine) to a 16 pro max (amex doesn’t work, all other cards do, and physical amex works fine).
I just got off of a chat with Amex support who told me that this is a general issue, and caused by Apple who “lock” contactless apple pay transactions for cards that have been added to more devices within a period of time than an internal apple algorithm allows. Apparently there is a cooling off period of a couple of weeks after which transactions will start to work again on the phone.
Im not sure I believe Amex support based on the way card payments work in the UK, but thought it might be useful info for others in the same boat.
The only thing that gives me cause to assign any credence to the explanation is that when I upgraded the phone, all the verifications failed because I hadn’t moved the sim over (hence no sms verification), so deleted all cards and added them back - effectively adding the same cards to the same device within about an hour of each other. No idea why Amex is impacted but multiple other mastercard and visa cards seem to work fine.
One other wrinkle in my case was that we moved house just before the upgrade, and I changed the account address with Amex and my banks, but hadn’t realised until I checked that the billing address on registered apple pay cards must be manually updated within card details in the wallet app - all my cards had the old billing address. I thought this might be the issue as remote transactions use card address postcode as part of the verification process but a test after updating the amex card details still resulted in a decline yesterday.
Any way, should the thing start working again in a week or two I’ll update this to let people know. In the meantime if anyone can use this info to shed further light with apple support, I’d be interested in findings.
