4 hours ago, Liverpool Lou said:

You're right, BBL had, still has, a contract with Union Pay to distribute their cards but you're wrong to say that BBL "still carries on with these games".  Mastercard debit cards have been available with BBL for years again since the UP issues.

The thing is every branch operates differently and there is no consistency. While I read many reports here over the years of people getting the mastercards and visa cards (they were before MasterCard). It was not my experience.

I was denied at 2 pattaya outlets then in phuket mall they said "no have". I complained over the phone as they also quietly upgraded my expired regular card to be the expensive useless union pay sirroj card..

The phone service was good and called the branch where they then said the mastercards need to be ordered. They found another branch that said they had the cards but when I went in they again said "no have". 

After trying so many times just to get a normal debit card i gave up and closed my account.

Closing my account took 5 minutes and was by contrast the easiest thing i every done with them. 

 

You can ask them to order it, theoretically if any branch genuinely doesn't have MasterCard in stock they can order it from Bangkok. Takes 7 days, I think you can also get your name on it when you do it this way.

 

I can understand why you just gave up though.

On 11/12/2021 at 7:32 PM, Jorje said:

I opened an account in Bangkok Bank and got a card.  The card has "Be 1st smart" and "Siriraj" on it.

 

I'm guessing you have the UnionPay variant.

 

A TPN/Mastercard version might support more payment options.

 

https://www.bangkokbank.com/en/Personal/Cards/Be1st-Smart-Card/Be1st-Smart-TPN-Mastercard

 

 

Oops, I forgot to report back.

Looks like I managed to activate some payments. I used an ATM, I chose an option that had "Bualuang iBanking and Mobile banking", then there was an option to unlock all operations, I pressed it, typed my phone number, and it then said that I don't need to unlock anything because I already had all services unlocked. But right after going through this, I was able to pay for some online services that hadn't worked before. So I guess it helped. I haven't made many payments since then so I cannot be sure. Netflix still didn't work and I had to buy a gift card from Tesco Lotus. This was last Sunday.

 

On 11/14/2021 at 8:53 AM, mtls2005 said:

I'm guessing you have the UnionPay variant.

No, it has TPN and MasterCard logos on it.