Account freezing

I was wondering if anyone could offer some reassurance with the whole account freezing thing. I have recently opened a monzo account as I am going abroad in February and saw that monzo is ment to be perfect for this. But at the same time, I don’t want to be on holiday with no access to my money. I was hoping to rely on monzo as i don’t like the idea of carrying a lot of cash but don’t fancy bank charges either.

Broadly speaking, you should have no more concern over Monzo freezing your account than you would any other bank doing so - be it another fintech, or one of the big high-street banks - as, broadly speaking, the things that would trigger Monzo to freeze an account are also things that would trigger Starling or Natwest or anyone else you can think of to freeze an account.

Therefore, you should be just fine using Monzo abroad.

Personally I would add the caveat that you should also have at least one credit card and/or at least one Visa card also (Monzo is Mastercard) just in case, so you have an alternative option in the event one place won’t or can’t take your Monzo card (this isn’t because of any concern about Monzo, but just because it’s always good to have at least one other option so you don’t have a single point of failure, as it were).

Hope that helps to reassure you.

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I have used my Monzo card for large purchases in Vietnam and Thailand (Got some suits made) and was fine then. And withdrawing from cash points was fine as well

Have also used it in many countries round Europe with no issue what so ever

I would say the advice about Visa is less about Monzo and more about Mastercard - I think Visa had an outage this year and there is no reason the same could not happen for Mastercard

Still got my Visa card from HSBC in case

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