Financial tips for traveling with your debit card

Planning a long vacation or business trip?

When making plans to travel, don't forget to include your financial institution in your pre-departure checklist. Items to consider include:

• When your travel plans include locations identified as higher risk for electronic fraud (i.e. international travel, major international commerce cities, etc.), contact your financial institution in advance to make them aware of your travel period and make sure your contact information is up-to-date. We recommend you provide us with your mobile phone number in case we need to contact you. Because of the substantial increase in electronic fraud, most financial institutions and cardholder networks have implemented fraud detection software which may limit or block your debit or credit card until verification of the authenticity of certain significant or unusual transactions have been conducted.

• Always have contingency plans for cash needs. We recommend at least two forms of electronic access (i.e. our debit card and our credit card) as well as consideration of currency and travelers cheque needs. This should protect you in cases of unexpected events such as network communications issues, lost or stolen cards, etc.

• Know your daily card limits for PIN-base and Signature-based transactions. Daily card limitations are established for debit cards based on account relationship(s) by your card issuer as a protection against substantial fraud loss. If traveling, you may wish to have your limits temporarily increased for your travel period. Feel free to contact our staff at 388-5700 to request an increase or to verify your daily card limits.

• Know your merchant. When using your debit or credit card, beware if the merchant takes your card out of your site if you are not familiar with the reputation of the merchant. Your cards magnetic strip could be duplicated with certain sophisticated devices by organized criminals.

• Know who/how to immediately contact if your card is lost or stolen. To protect yourself from liability for any losses resulting from unauthorized transactions, please contact our office ASAP upon discovery that you may have lost of have had your card stolen. We can be reached Monday thru Friday during regular business hours at 388-5700. After hours or on weekends, you may contact our after hours service by calling the 1-800 number obtained from Key-24 at 388-5724 or by visiting our web site and clicking on Contact Us/ Lost or stolen card.