Extended Health Benefit Insurance card

[Jyro]

I am looking for an answer. I am a massage therapist and been using two square readers (one is for swiping and another for tap) as my means of taking payments from my clients. I'm not using the terminal at the moment as it is a bit pricey.

I have this one client who uses a Canada Life visa card. This card gives them direct access to their fund for their health benefit/insurance. It only has as swipe feature.

When I used it on my square reader (the one that you insert into an aux port or audio jack port), it reads the card but says declined. It did not process the transaction. My client needed to use the personal credit card to pay for the service charged instead. Did I do something wrong with the machine or was it just that square does not recognize those kind of cards? It has a "visa" mark on it, so I thought it would work just like how credit cards do.

Thank you in advance for the answer/s.

[Sineaid · Accepted solution]

Hi @Jyro!

Thanks for reaching out for clarity on card acceptance with Square, and welcome to the Community!

Square works with any Canadian-issued, and most non-Canadian issued credit cards with a Visa, MasterCard, American Express, JCB, Discover or UnionPay International logo. So, if you've seen a decline against a Visa card, the payment being rejected will not have been the result of any user error on your side, and you'll have likely seen one of the following decline messages.

• “Declined. Card has expired. Please use a different card.”

• “Declined. Please use a different card.”

• “Declined. Please have cardholder call issuer before retrying transaction.”

• “Declined. Please verify the card number, expiration date, CVV and postal code.”

Each of the above pertains to a range of different issues, however you would need to contact our Customer Success team to gain further insight, as we don't have a detailed view of your account via the Community platform.

Generally speaking, there are some steps you can take to mitigate against the risk of declines, which you can learn more about here.

I hope this helps reassure you somewhat, but if you have any more questions, just let me know. 

[KhadijahGlover]

No, the same thing happened to me. The customer called their card to confirm her balance. She had enough money on the card. Yet, Square declined her healthy benefits Visa debit card from Humana. I, specifically, called ahead of time of picking up passenger to confirm that my account would accept this payment and to make sure Square accepted these types of cards. Uber, Lyft, and taxis accept them. I explained all of this and was told since it’s a Visa it should work automatically. Though, I thought I read online that your account may need to be approved to accept these kinds of cards. I’m frustrated and believe I should’ve asked to speak to a supervisor as I Still don’t know whether these cards are accepted by Square or whether my account needs approval to accept them. There’s no additional message with “Declined” message. It only reads “Declined” in red letters.