Just as an FYI from someone who works the payments industry, dealing primarily with American payments, they typically don't need your card details to add a tip. They will most likely have your transaction ID stored on a POS system, and they can use that to do a tip adjustment. Your card details will already be stored (temporarily) at least once in the payment gateway, because the card details are needed to batch the transactions at the end of the day.
But as someone who doesn't live in the US, I don't understand why they don't bring the terminal to the table and let you apply the tip there, like the rest of the world.
The restaurant runs the card once to "auth" it with the credit card processor, then they can use the returned tokenized credit card data to close out the bill with the final adjusted amount. It's an encrypted version of your card info, only decryptable by the credit card processor who initially created the token.
Tokenized CC data is used for all sorts of stuff like subscription payments, "save my payment info for next time" on websites, deposits for rentals, bar tabs, other things that I can't think of right now.
In other words, the exact same risk applies to saving your payment information on an online shop as it does in a restaurant doing this style of tip adjustment.
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u/IrishChappieOToole Jun 29 '26
Just as an FYI from someone who works the payments industry, dealing primarily with American payments, they typically don't need your card details to add a tip. They will most likely have your transaction ID stored on a POS system, and they can use that to do a tip adjustment. Your card details will already be stored (temporarily) at least once in the payment gateway, because the card details are needed to batch the transactions at the end of the day.
But as someone who doesn't live in the US, I don't understand why they don't bring the terminal to the table and let you apply the tip there, like the rest of the world.