I've been a USAA member for coming up on 20 years, and I have always been pleased with their service, so this is an outlier for me, but still very frustrating. I've been using Apple Pay with my iPhone 6 since USAA support rolled out in November. I also bought a new car last week, and when I was on the phone with USAA to update my auto policy, they asked what carrier my cell phone was on. I provided that info to them and then continued talking about the insurance. Well, that bit of into constitutes an 'update to your cell phone number.'
Yesterday I restored my iPhone, since it was having a few issues and I wanted a clean slate - when trying to add back my USAA cards, I get a 'that phone number is too new' for text confirmation. After talking with USAA on the phone, apparently the addition of which carrier my phone was on means they now need to do a full 'verification' of the phone number, which will take 4-6 weeks before I can use Apple Pay again. This is utterly absurd. The number is identical and hasn't changed in 9 years. I can log into my USAA account on the app (to even get to the 'text me a confirmation code' part), and provide any other information, but none of that is good enough: a service that I've been using for 6 months (and that I use all the time) is now unavailable for over a month because they need to 'verify' against fraud. What fraud could I possibly be committing with the same phone number, the same PHONE, the same account and multiple verification steps.
WHY is this the only way to verify?
