Thank you all so much for your continued concern and for being so invested in my situation; I truly appreciate the engagement.
To address the point regarding marketing: in a regulated environment, marketing consent (permission to be contacted about offers) is legally distinct from product enrollment. Having marketing ‘turned on’ allows a bank to send me an email about a trial; it does not grant them a mandate to activate that trial or alter my account features without my explicit ‘opt-in’.
To be absolutely fair to the facts: Monzo has already sent me written confirmation explicitly admitting they enrolled me because they ‘thought I would like it’. This confirms, by the bank’s own admission, that this was an unauthorised action, which is why a formal investigation is now correctly underway under Ref: 1196251.
I’m happy to leave the matter in the hands of the bank’s Compliance experts, as they deal with these regulatory nuances every day. I won’t be responding further as the proper channels are now handling it, but thank you again for your enthusiasm! Have a lovely day.
If you’ve already started the complaints process I’m not sure why you’re posting here about it. I expect most of us here know about this free trial (because that’s all it is) and don’t have an issue with it.
We’re a tiny portion of Monzo’s customer base who are very engaged without our banking requirements so I expect that there’ll be even fewer customers out ‘in the wild’ who care about being given something for free for a few days.
I get where you’re coming from. It’s a great ploy and sales technique by them as you will probably try it out and then want to upgrade. For me, it kinda worked as I was almost adamant about not doing it. BUT: I get where you’re coming from.
That said, could they be doing this via the “Essential” route that you cannot toggle?
I can tell you now, the Monzo app pings to its own marketing API and Braze.eu (and others) many times a day, and when you navigate through the app almost all of the time. This is irrespective of the ‘choice’ () you make under marketing. Whether it fully respects this is another question entirely…
Thank you for sharing your own settings, Carlo, but they are irrelevant to my account. Marketing consent is for communication, not for activating product trials without a specific opt-in. Monzo has already admitted in writing that my enrollment was unauthorised, and the matter is now being investigated under Ref: 1196251. I’ll leave the speculation to you and go enjoy the bank holiday. Have a lovely day.
It is truly impressive to see such dedication; I am sure Monzo values having a voluntary legal defence team working for free on a bank holiday. I will leave you to your memes while I deal with the actual Compliance Team regarding Ref: 1196251. Have a lovely day!
This is the silliest complaint I have ever read. No bank needs your permission to alter the features of your account; they just need to let you know they are doing so. All banks change the features of their accounts from time to time. If you don’t like the new features, you then have the option of closing your account and banking elsewhere instead.
What a load of fuss over nothing.
You raise some good points or at least ‘food for thought’. I’m very much an advocate for using data sensibly and with privacy/security in mind and conscious of organisations sailing close to the wind (psst: the others on this forum already think I’m nuts and probably have shares in tin foil manufacturers )
But, is this an exaggeration? I’m on the fence on this one.
Is it a sneaky ploy to get people to test benefits of a paid for subscription? Yes.
Did I explicitly ‘ask for it’? No. And this is where I find there is no way to explicitly NOT ask for it and I then start looking at other implications.
Does it affect my life negatively? No.
Does it encroach on or negatively impact privacy/security? No.
So, for me, I’m not overly concerned. But I do see your point!
I could be wrong here, but I think it falls into this piece:
And I think this relates to your query because it doesn’t explicitly say you consent to opt in to an active feature, merely show you:
and show you things that we think you’ll find interesting or helpful
So, what I suspect here is Monzo maybe acknowledging your case. Personally, I think Monzo may be using this under ‘Essential’ criteria (that you cannot toggle) and should be under another toggle. I don’t see where it would fit, currently, but Monzo could introduce another toggle around “auto-enrollment of new features/functions” or similar. This would have negated any complaint and solve your query.
So, on balance, kudos for raising it as it may prompt Monzo to categorise correctly and (IF I am correct), move it out of ‘Essential’. Because, arguably (?), it isn’t…
I will go against the grain here - I don’t like it, neither did several folk last time, neither did several of my friends and my partner. In fact it turned him off Monzo completely.
I think this is a form of marketing. If you have marketing turned off this should absolutely fall under that and you should not be getting it
I wouldn’t go as far as complaints etc, but I wouldn’t like it from my bank. I want stability. If I want a paid bank account I’ll get it. Sell it to me by all means but if the product is good enough it will sell itself.
Because it’s exactly matches up with dark pattern predatory behaviour, Aris pretty much admitted the last time that Monzo is intentionally bypassing consent and putting commercial priority over conduct. It’s Exploiting Inertia and reducing the customer to a marketing data point when they may just and to be left alone and make their own choices.
I don’t think a complaint is unfair, as it’s clear Monzo know they shouldn’t be doing yet someone behind the scenes though let’s try the same problematic thing again.clearly there is a very strong Product First, Customer Second mentality going on within Monzo and as you said I and many others aren’t here for it.
Sorry for not joining the tinfoil hat club guys, throw your abuse I don’t care
I think this is the key thing here. It’s a marketing decision that can go one of three ways - do nothing/cost nothing, increase revenue by sign up after the fact or decrease revenue by putting people off. Seems like a commercial decision for Monzo to consider after weighing it up. Looking at my DNS, given the amount of tracking Monzo does it probably knows what someone had for breakfast this morning and predict when and where they’ll eat dinner tonight (!), so I’m sure they have that metric covered on if this is going to overly affect them.
And this is the crux of it in my opinion. I agree. And with the OP that there should be an option to not be auto-enrolled.
Thanks for providing the link to the previous thread also. I had a skim read and can see points raised with regulatory excerpts. Really useful.
Like I say, for me I’m not overly concerned and, actually, they got me to sign up so it’s a win for Monzo. I think it’ll be of nominal value to Monzo for the complaints they receive about this specifically - so unlikely to change perhaps?
I agree. The wider implications of something a bit “shady” or “sneaky” does make me question what else they might do or be doing already. As stated, their API and the sheer volume of tracking makes me slightly uncomfortable - albeit I can control that my end to some degree.
I could say more but it’s not for this thread as it’s specifically about the opt-in (or not as the case clearly identifies). But this decision to auto-enrol does have wider considerations and precisely as you highlight:
Customer choice is key. Respecting decisions is also key. Not allowing a choice in the first place (case in point) is not a good look, despite how beneficial it may be or how much this specific case doesn’t directly affect a person/their finances.
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Anarchist
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Just so you know, this happened to me a few weeks ago, and you will be receiving emails during the week encouraging you to make use of the features, so that’ll be something else you probably don’t want.
) you make under marketing. Whether it fully respects this is another question entirely…
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