What are you talking about?
There are no ATMs outside of Taipei? Do you not know that all 7-11s have an ATM inside them?
And how do you think I experienced not finding an ATM? Without leaving my apartment?
It may surprise you, but there are areas in Taiwan that is hard even to even a 7-11 nearby.
My comment was that high density ATM is highly driven by Taipei and New Taipei, where you donāt need to walk more than 50m to bump into one.
Yeah, in the middle of nowhere where no one lives. Thatās like saying āall my friends are fitā when the discussion is about obesity.
Foreign husbands are ATMs.
I opened a chinese bank account a few years back because it was such a pain working in their cashless system when I would go visit.
Now, however, theyāre getting more tourist friendly. You can pre-load a certain amount into Alipay with a foreign credit card for 2 weeks. Whatever you donāt use in those 2 weeks gets refunded back to you. Itās a pretty small amount (I think only 4000 rmb), but any larger purchases the establishment will likely take CC.
Again, @Gain, what area you talking about?
You donāt need to go to the middle of Taroko National Park to not find an ATM. Just leave big cities and youāll know it.
Heck, just recently I was in a cash-only B&B in Yilan and I had to drive to go find an ATM. Iām not complaining, just making an observation.
Or are you going to say that no one lives in Yilan? I donāt think @IbisWtf would agree with thatā¦
Edit: actually nevermind
You are indeed The Wise!
How to apply for it?
Itās an option within the Alipay app (which is also in English)
Hereās an article:
Itās not the end-all solution, but at least a step in the right direction.
Good thing is that thereās an option to the āhas-it-allā Wechat app
Itās not dreadful, but just a bit of a mess. So Iāll load up my Easy Card or Yoyo card or whatever it is supposed to be called, then go to the small supermarket down the road, who donāt take it, but they do take contact payment on the credit card (operators refer to it as shua ka). Then, one day Iāll be at quan lian, have no balance on the yoyo card, and go to pay by credit card, but they donāt take my card which is an international bank, and works at the previously mentioned supermarket.
Then there are a million individual single store sign up type electronic payment deals, coupled with bloatware apps, which mine your spending data for some nominal discount.
You end up just taking cash everywhere. As Wu Tang clan famously coined, in this initialisation referring specifically to Taiwanās payments system: CREAM: cash rules everything around me.
Then you get those bloody annoying situations where the store only accepts a certain bankās credit card because theyāve cut a deal with them. I quit Costco because of that.
And quanlian Px only takes taixin and China trust cards, and 711 only takes Cathay etc etc.
Drives me nuts, have to bring a bag of credit cards around
Taiwan effed up the mobile payments. The solution was to link it to the Easycard system, but both the team working on the Taiwan Pay and Easycard office didnāt want to cowork for political reasons.
It would have been so simple if I could use my phone to get on the subway and everywhere they take Easycard.
Now PXmart and Carrefour have come up with their own mobile payment service, which you know in the end will be exclusive to each store. So basically we have the mobile version of a different credit cards for each stores
Why do you think will they remove easy card as payment option? They already installed the terminals everywhere.
Please check the original definition of 3rd world.
I mean mobile payments. I could see them only allowing their own service over say Line Pay or Apple Pay
If they accept NFC credit card payments then it will also work for Google Pay. I assume Apple Pay is similar.
Line Pay is proprietary tech and works with QR codes. So that needs to be specifically added to POS terminal.