Announcing the Overdrafts Preview!

Monzos customer numbers :wink:

I am not a Monzo staff member or involved in Monzo in any way other than being a customer and Crowdcube investor. All comments are my own :sunglasses:

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I can see two new credit searches from Monzo this week on my credit file, quotation and administration searches… Presuming this was to check eligibility for overdraft. If my file/points/however a company decides on their criteria, wasn’t suited to Monzo, will it become curtsy to advise a customer they are not suitable right now? :slight_smile:

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Introducing @finitejest, Maria! Our lending PM to answer your questions much better than me :tada:

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I would not pay a fee to access the Monzo Account, even if that included a free overdraft (which I likely would never use). Nor do I think most people would. Remember this forum is a bubble with 6-7K active monthly users that is not representative of the 200K Monzo Current Accounts. I think it’s safe to say the people in this forum are more invested than most.

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Hey @finitejest!

I just wanted to know, can you give us an idea as to what Monzo’s own ‘eligibility criteria’ are when applying for the overdraft, and when are more people on the Google form overdraft preview list going to be unlocked and allowed to apply for one?

Thank you! :raised_hands:

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:wave: all, a very short update to hopefully answer some of the more frequent questions. More details will follow next week.

How quickly is overdraft being rolled out?
We are in the process of rolling out the overdraft to all of our eligible current account customers. We are doing this gradually, because we want to give ourselves time to test the infrastructure and make sure everything works as expected. Also we want to give ourselves time to react to your feedback and make sure we build the experience that works for everyone. So far, we have rolled out overdrafts in batches of a thousand people, at the rate of a few batches each week. We’ve done about 10 of these batches so far. These are either people who have expressed an interest in overdraft or offered to be an early tester + people who have been randomly selected from our more active current account users.

Will I know if I don’t get an overdraft?
If you’ve expressed interest in an overdraft or signed up to be an early tester, than you will receive an email later today informing you if you haven’t been offered an overdraft at this time. If you are one of the people randomly selected for the overdraft preview, then you are only notified if you are eligible for an overdraft.

Why didn’t I get an overdraft? Why are my limits lower than I expected?
TL;DR Please :bear: with us. We’re still in the early days of our overdraft offering and so the rules we currently use to determine whether or not to offer someone credit are relatively conservative. We are learning lots about the best user experience and all things lending. In addition to which, we are committed to lending responsibly. As such, we are likely to err on the side of being overly cautious and not offer you an overdraft right now, even if you have a good credit score. By rolling out lending slowly at lower amounts, it limits the risk we take on and allows us time to learn how we can best handle or avoid cases of financial difficulties or fraud.

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re: eligibility criteria - we use information from our Credit Rating Agency + our own internal eligibility rules, which (as I mentioned above) are fairly conservative at the moment; we’ll make sure to add more information about this in our blog post next week

re: Google Form - we’ve started rolling out to users on that list on a few days ago and should get into a regular cadence from now on, say once a week we make sure we’ve looked at everyone on that list (e.g. the last 900 or so people we’re aiming to get through this week :crossed_fingers:)

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A couple of questions, but first welcome to the community!

Do you have a plan on how to manage Overdraft increases? Will there be a prompt in the feed or would it be a case of someone needing to contact support to see if they are eligible? If the latter, do you have a rough idea on when users can increase?

Secondly, I’m not sure if your the right person, but, a while ago I remember seeing on the forums that an option to pay for a transaction in parts was in testing, is this still rolling out and how close are we to seeing this coming to the mainstream?

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Sounds like you weekly budget is slightly optimistic. Wouldn’t it work out slightly cheaper - regardless of the overdraft cost (unless its free) - to increase this slightly?

My budget is £85 a week which is largely for food and car club hire. It’s creeping up slowly as I work through my debt snowball.

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I received an email from Monzo

Monzo Overdraft: We couldn’t match your email address

Hi,

Thank you for expressing an interest in a Monzo overdraft!

Unfortunately, you appear to have done so using an email address that does not match the one you used to create your Monzo account. Please use this Google Form and make sure you enter the same email address you use for Monzo (you can check in the Account tab). We’ll then aim to complete our checks in the next few days and let you know.

Thank you for helping us build overdrafts.

Have a great day.
The Monzo Team

This is my Monzo email and I have overdraft already…

I got the same e-mail and I already have an Overdraft, Ive just reported this to CoOps

I also just got that email.

And I didn’t get the email and still waiting on the preview list :man_shrugging:t2:

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So are you picking people from the list based on set criteria before going as far as credit scoring etc? Rather than going through either first come first served or names at random?

This is the part that is confusig me.

Edit: and welcome to the community :grin:

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all firms providing credit use their own rating system. There is no such thing as a credit score per se and the scores you see in TV ads are a marketing ploy to entice you to use their services

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The benefit of credit agencies are identification (do you exist), total exposure (limits/balances) and history (late/defaults). Combined they are a good indicator and additional information to a companies own history/exposure/scoring etc.

These can also be used in two ways:
Automated scoring and approval, feeding the agencies data into company models
Manual scoring, should an automated system refer than a person could review and make a manual decision.

Anyway who is anyone to question your spending because you point out a rip off overdraft. Pfft. :slight_smile:

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I wasn’t questioning spending.

I was wondering why on earth anyone would request a £100 overdraft in what could only have been the last month or so, knowing in advance what the cost will be, spend that £100, keep surplus funds away from the overdraft which is now charging, and then allocate themselves £85 a week whilst remaining entirely in what is, in truth, a small overdraft limit, deliberately costing themselves the maximum fee, before complaining bitterly on the bank’s forum that it’s expensive.

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@finitejest and @tristan - were there any updates on the overdraft batch last night? Looks like there were some errors on the e-mails that had gone out.

I was told by COps yesterday that my account was on the next batch to be processed - all many of us received were e-mails saying that our e-mail addresses could not be matched to our accounts. That is incorrect, so would it be possible for an update on this?

Many thanks
Chris

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