3 x standing orders declined overnight

How is it not a weakness if a Direct Debit (I’m unsure on this one, have heard it mentioned but don’t know) or standing order that people rely on can fail? It’s definitely a weakness.

So much of banking isn’t ‘pretty’ in terms of the code behind it, but it still needs to work.

I’m all for cleaning up everything possible, but sometimes things just need to be hack-jobbed into working.

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Certainly a weakness. Other banks retry when insufficient funds such as outgoing the same day as incoming payments from salary. Or like this, when something else goes wrong.

Ah the old “expecting failure” vs “instant notifications” problem: legacy banks expect their systems and other banks to be unavailable and so automatically retry, however, new banks want to keep their customers informed to the second and so leave the retry choice up to the customer…

I wonder if the scheduled maintenance windows are “known and circulated in advance” so Monzo could just “soft fail” and go “Receiving bank undergoing maintenance - transaction will be reattempted in 6 hours time”. Unscheduled maintenance/remote failure - perhaps things like SOs have a “hidden soft failure” option and they are auto-retried automatically with just a “Pending” message.

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Sort of?

http://personal.rbs.co.uk/personal/service-status.html

http://personal.natwest.com/personal/service-status.html

Having given this some thought (it’s the second time this has happened to me) I’d really like Monzo to do something about this or at least give an update on what they are doing. It’s not a pleasant feeling waking up to a bunch of decline messages and it’s also not pleasant to have to manually re-enter all of the details to make the payment(s).

Longer term, suppressing the decline messages may be the answer, but in the short term can we have a “retry” option or at least allow support to retry them if requested by a customer (I did ask yesterday but was told computer says no). This is exacerbated by the longer than usual response times support are currently encountering.

I’d also like to know if Direct Debits are also affected by this issue?

Does anyone know what Starling/Revolut etc. do in this situation? Is it handled any better?

I have 22 scheduled payments from my account so this is important to me.

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At the moment, Direct Debits are affected by this issue on Monzo. It is recommended that you don’t have them come out the same day that your salary (or other credit to cover them) comes in (don’t know if you remember, but you posted further up in this thread!):

And the issue was more recently confirmed, further down the thread:

Agree that this isn’t a good situation, hopefully :monzo: sort it out before adding too many more current accounts. It’s the kind of little thing that could have big consequences for some people, especially with the charges and fees some payees have for missed direct debits.

And I agree that a simple ‘retry’ option for the failed standing orders would be great.

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I naively believed that if there was an issue with a d/d or s/o Monzo would keep trying on the allotted day, and not fail it until midnight of that day.

Is there a reason why this is not possible?

Edit to add: For me this is a massive issue, and something that would definitely stop me moving to Monzo fully.

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Thanks, interesting… Actually I didn’t post in that thread, it was a topic merge.

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My salary is in my account at least a week before any DD’s/SO’s are due.

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That isn’t necessarily the same issue though. That’s if you don’t have enough in your account to cover the Direct Debit. What if you do, but the receiving bank’s system is down? Will that fail, too? If so, it is quite concerning…

This is one of the things that Starling do better imo. They retry DDs at 4pm and send you a message to make sure you have funds available.

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Interesting, would be nice to see something like this but with Monzo.

I am very disappointed by this issue. To my knowledge, the account is no longer in beta. Why were these issues not identified and resolved through the preview accounts? It makes me feel very uneasy about what else in the account isn’t really functioning correctly.

While I understand wanting to get everything rolled out as soon as possible, there’s only one chance to make a first impression. Testing things on users is all very well while you’re in beta, but many users have no interest in being a tester and want to use systems that have been well tested and “just work”.

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Nothing is being “tested” here, this is just the way the account works at the moment. This did come up during the Beta, it’s somewhere on this forum along with the stated desire to improve this handling mechanism in due course…

Not being in Test is not the same as being finished - that won’t happen for years (hopefully) as I’m expecting new functionality to be added over numerous development iterations in the future.

I do agree that this one is less than ideal. I hope I never fall foul of it because it is a weakness at the moment. Hopefully it will get a makeover sooner rather than later.

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I might be barking up the wrong transaction type here - but aren’t we merging multiple things?

— standing orders : which the sender sets up and controls
— direct debits : which the recipient sets up and controls amount and when
— available funds
— system down time / failure

From what I’ve read the problem initially was recipient system down time, and a Standing Order? If another system is down, agreed Monzo should reattempt - but for how long?

But we’ve also talked about all of the other items above.

Direct Debits I think it’s for recipient to reattempt - but if no funds that’s just down to account holder right? You then get into credit rating issues. If Monzo messes these up it’s a problem for sure. But not sure I’ve read anything about this - having a bunch of DDs go out same day as pay day isn’t a great idea using any bank.

Anywayyyyy, loving my current account and Monzo overall. That all said I’m only drip feeding SOs, DDs into my account and salary staying elsewhere for a little longer.

Oh, and this is my first community post so please at least try to be nice with your replies!

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The impression I get with DDs is that the receiving bank requests but it’s up to the paying bank to make sure the money is transferred on the requested day.

If that’s true then it’s on ‘my’ bank to ensure the money gets through on the day in question. At that point, DDs are just the same as a Standing Order in the sense that it’s the responsibility of ‘my’ bank to ensure that ‘my’ outgoings are transferred correctly.

I’m clearly responsible to ensure funds are in the account…sadly :frowning:

It’s the downtime that could be a grey area but, if other banks retry automatically, then custom and practice suggests that that’s the way it’s done even if I don’t know what rules govern the process.

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Uh… missing payments is much less desirable though!

Pretty surprised at the decision to go that way on the trade-off, that doesn’t sound right to me at all.

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Another instance of this (same 3 SO’s) again on 25/1 this time owing to a time out between Monzo and the receiving bank.

Had to make the payments manually.

Doesn’t fill me with confidence.

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This is a concern. I wouldn’t have even thought it was a possibility that Monzo hadn’t created code to deal with this situation. Surely things like this should be a priority to fix?!

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