Debit card declined on Apple Watch

[Stephen Watson]

Hi peeps,

I wondered if anyone has had this and knows how to resolve it. I’ve not called my bank or Apple yet or removed any cards and restarted.

I have my personal debit card and shared debit card on both my iPhone and watch. There are adequate funds in both accounts. Recently, paying on my personal card with the watch has been declined - twice yesterday, twice a few days before and also several days before that. Each time when I used my personal card on my iPhone instead, it was approved so I assumed something was wrong with the watch.

However, yesterday, when my personal card on the watch was declined twice I tried again but with the shared card on the watch and it approved almost instantly! So the watch works only with my shared card and my iPhone works with both.

I have had consistent issues over a few years, at particular venues, where the watch always fails on one of their card readers but never on their other one. The iPhone always works on either.

Any thoughts?

Removing my personal card from my watch wallet and re-adding seems the next step but I thought I’d ask here first. Thanks people.

Cheers,
Stephen

You meet your destiny on the road you take to avoid it. ~ Carl Jung

[Sam - MacAmbulance]

Definitely remove & re-add the card, It’ll refresh the various cryptographic tokens it agrees with the bank. The ol’ turn it off and on again

_

Regards Sam Mullen +44 (0)7747778022 in...@macambulance.com www.macambulance.com MacAmbulance Ltd. Providing Affordable Mac/PC Support and Web Development

MacAmbulance Ltd. is a registered company in England & Wales, registration number 8466597 This email is intended solely for the addressed recipients and may contain privileged or confidential information. If you have received this email in error please notify the sender and delete the email immediately.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sussex Mac User Group" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to smug+uns...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/smug/88D9E13F-C130-4FC5-862F-9617A521EB22%40icloud.com.

[Stephen Watson]

Hi y’all,

Quick update - I removed the card and re-added it and it has now worked for two transactions out of two! 🙂

Why, after working just fine for several years, it decides not to on my card but the other card does is probably something only Apple or Nationwide know …

Thanks Sam.

Cheers,

Stephen

You meet your destiny on the road you take to avoid it. ~ Carl Jung

On 4 Oct 2026, at 15:23, Sam - MacAmbulance <in...@macambulance.com> wrote:

Definitely remove & re-add the card, It’ll refresh the various cryptographic tokens it agrees with the bank. The ol’ turn it off and on again

To view this discussion, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/smug/4349C715-A561-4FD8-AAA6-9B0A040DF539%40macambulance.com.