Miles Talk reports on an interesting statement from Eliot Buchanan, the co-founder of Plastiq. There had been some concern over the last few months about issuers who had added new language about cash-like transactions incurring cash advance fees and one category of concern was bill payments using third party payment services. The good news is that Plastiq says that transactions that would code as cash advances will not be possible via Plastiq, which means that a transaction that goes through should be safe.
One of the big questions marks of recent months was wording from Chase stating that “making a payment using a third party service including bill payment transactions not made directly with the merchant or their service provider” would be treated as a cash advance. That led many to be concerned that payments through Plastiq might code as cash advances moving forward.
However, Dave at Miles Talk reports official word from Plastiq saying that they consulted payment networks in advance and that “Plastiq transactions would not be impacted by those changes and we communicated that to our customers who inquired. Transactions that would be treated as cash advances are not possible on Plastiq.”
Take that for what it’s worth as Plastiq obviously can’t control how Chase (or any bank) chooses to code a transaction, but Plastiq indicates that they’ve been testing with Chase cards and have not run into an issue. I’d think it is in Plastiq’s best interest to stay on top of any changes in that regard, so I’d be inclined to trust that there is no reason to expect a transaction through Plastiq to code as a cash advance, though I’d also leave room for the possibility of an announced change before they catch it. Therefore, it would be wise to set the cash advance limit to 0 or as low as the issuer will allow on any cards you intend to use through Plastiq (which is a good general practice). You can typically do that with Chase via secure message
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