An Update on Overdrafts

I totally agree and this is something that I have pointed out in the past

I will be running my legacy bank until things improve with Monzo, which I have no doubt will happen eventually.

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It is preferable to have an overdraft facility with monzo though as a credit controller I know that if you use your overdraft say once every now and then so it’s not a bad thing as monzo are getting profitability out of you and conversely this makes you better as a risk to lend to. That’s what goes into my thinking on an impulse purchase.

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All of us have to evaluate the offer. For me no joint accounts is the deal breaker. If you require the safety net of an overdraft and Monzo can’t offer it then wait until they are a fully developed bank and can offer overdrafts to your requirements. For me Monzo has not really developed much past the prepaid days, but time will tell.

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Beware, if you use the full Current Account Switch Service to transfer your direct debits to Monzo, your old account will be closed automatically as that is part of the switch. There is no reason, though, you can’t wait to do the switch until after any overdraft is confirmed at Monzo.

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@anon81274823 j06 @j06 :+1:

All very valid points and also that in respect of @dawntrespass credit controllers point of view :thinking:

We will just have to wait and see how the roll out programme runs

It’s nice to see people with similar financial opinions at long last

There is a partial service you can use which won’t close your old account.

We have no criteria for you opening your Monzo account so feel free to keep any other accounts open for your needs :+1:

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Do you lose any benefits by going partial?

@WillP79 this is from BACS website;

SS

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Hmmm…looks a bit ropey. Never mind - luckily I have two accounts with my old bank, so I can sacrifice one. Shame though- it was my student account, and has a cool account number!

I used the partial service once many years ago. As long as you ensure that all DDs and standing orders move, and keep some cash in the old account for those times you forget to update your account details on an app you rarely use, it should be fine.

I didn’t encounter any issues in those more simple days.

Sounds a bit like doing it yourself?

It sounds like all it does is save you having to re-setup your payments, otherwise it is no different

Yeah. It is a bit. All my payments were transferred over for me, which was all I wanted. I think that that is the potentially time consuming but of the process of you are doing it yourself.

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My take on a partial switch from elsewhere in the forum:

tl;dr – do it yourself.

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I’m back! This time with answers :tada:

Firstly, I’m really sorry if you have received poor/no communication from us around this. That’s totally our fault and shouldn’t be the case. We’re working to improve it now so it doesn’t happen again.

I’m going to try and clearly lay out the details for those of you who filled in the ‘early access’ form and haven’t heard anything/heard incorrect stuff. After that, I’ll give a bit more detail about general overdraft rollout.

  • So…just under 10k people filled out the form saying they’d be happy to help us test the overdrafts beta. Thank you!
  • Of those, we then emailed about 300 of you to say we hadn’t been able to match the email you submitted with a Monzo account. Some of those 300 were in error — you did in fact submit the right email and human error on our end meant you got that email. We’re sorry about that. You should have received a follow up email to explain this, but we didn’t. That’s totally our fault.
  • We then did a soft credit check on a majority of those 10k people. This is the same check as the one that’ll happen when you sign up to Monzo if you’re signing up directly for a full current account. A proportion of those people were successfully matched against credit databases and passed our ‘eligibility criteria’ for an overdraft. If you were in that bucket, you will have received a push notification and item in your feed to let you know you can now try out the overdraft.
  • If we couldn’t match you against credit databases (maybe because you moved recently) or you didn’t pass our eligibility criteria, we didn’t send you anything to let you know. This was because we hoped to be able to rerun the check in the near future with better data and then be able to let you know. Unfortunately this took longer than expected and so you were left without knowing about it. We’re sorry about that, it shouldn’t have happened.
  • Finally, there were about 2.5k people we didn’t run the soft check against at all. That’s because we’d begun larger scale rollouts by then and so doing it manually would have taken too long. Again, I’m sorry you weren’t kept in the loop there.

The tl;dr of this is: if you haven’t heard anything, it could be a variety of reasons (see above) and we’re sorry we didn’t inform you better about this. We won’t let this happen again. It’s a product of running a Preview, but is still far from ideal.

So, the future! Overdraft rollouts have taken slightly longer than we thought they were going to for a bunch of technical reasons. However, we’re now in a pretty solid place and hopefully over the next month or two will be able to both a) soft credit check everyone and b) notify them if they’re eligible for an overdraft and c) let those who aren’t eligible know why they aren’t eligible and what they can do about it. These are all things that will happen.

If you’re desperately waiting for an overdraft from us, I’d ask for a little more patience now. We know it’s taken a while and we’re sorry that we haven’t communicated it to the best of our ability. We are 100% committed to rolling out overdrafts fully (it’s our main revenue stream after all), but we’re also taking the time to make sure we get it right. It’s really important that we do that. As soon as I have a clearer idea of detailed timelines, I’ll share them here.

I hope that helps and answers your questions. Thank you all!

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And a quick follow up on this, which I thought was very clear

Done

In progress — for now, if you don’t see the button it’s because we haven’t got to you yet. Working on it!

Agreed, will do.

Thanks!

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Thank you @tristan for the detailed response. I think this is all that was missing and now cleared up :+1:t2:

One question, are users able to proactively apply for an overdraft through COps and be assessed or is the ability not yet in place?

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@tristan

Thank you so much for this exstensive and well briefed response to the many questions that have been posted recently

I for one feel a little more content after reading the information and will now sit back and wait for things to evolve further in due course

Buisy times for the Monzo team but also like to reiterate that you stated the importance of overdraft facilities as it will be one of the main revenue generating streams for Monzo

Again thank you

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Not at the moment. We’re just focusing on assessing everyone as soon as possible!

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My only question is, for those that have been accepted is there a reassessment stage where the level they’ve been offered could be increased? ie. From £100 to £500 or so? Or is this the limit for the time being to mitigate risk etc?

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