They ought to work on allowing the app to cache more resources, which would mean it almost wouldnât matter that itâs technically server-side content.
I have a horribly slow ADSL connection still (no fibre of any type to speak of here yet) which makes the experience of using some of these sort of apps painful!
Tried to get a payment authorised and chatbot didnât understand my 3 attempts so âwe are connecting you to an assistantâ
14 hours later and no reply. Gave them a nudge. Then someone replied and gave me the chat opening hours which is basically 24/7 and then said they couldnât help and bombarded me with survey questions. Awful!
Got through on the phone pretty quickly and easily though
Yes notifications are usually instant. Even though what I found annoying is that they donât send you notifications for all transactions but only the âunusualâ transactions. At least thatâs what their help desk told me .
I wouldnât say high street banks adding instant notifications is them âcatching upâ, in fact Iâd say itâs the opposite. Theyâre copying the neobank digital players, but at the same time backing themselves further into a technology corner â their whole systems are Frankenstein bits bolted onto to ageing software. Eventually* it will fail, and it keeps getting more expensive, and more difficult, to transition away.
(I say eventually*, but weâve already witnessed parts of the NatWest entity go down for weeks.)
Also worth highlighting that itâs taken them years to introduce this, which puts into perspective how quickly Monzo and Co can launch features when compared to them.
In one talk I watched, from Gary H, one high street bank had quoted a timescale of a few months and a 5 figure budget for introducing a gambling block - something which started as an afternoon project for one engineer, at Monzo. The same for freezing a card - it shouldâve just been a boolean flag in a database somewhere, but it was over complicated by the legacy banks.
Itâs worth remembering that many of those banks could send you text messages when you made a transaction and had been able to do so for years before Monzo was created so in-app notifications duplicated something they already had.
If it was so easy for Monzo to make changes, you would think they would have much better support for joint accounts (for instance).
My take is that Monzo have a system where it is so easy to make changes that they sometimes go for that, and do it now, rather than overcomplicate and introduce delay. This is probably why joint accounts arenât always supported by new features straight away, as to add support could delay the feature or [they are flexible enough to be able to launch without it so] they can launch without it.
Sort of Mininum Viable Product in action, and it makes sense as most users donât have a joint account so for them it means the feature is available quicker, and even joint users can get the feature quicker if they are willing to use their personal account for it.
Yeah some of the systems are are bit old school, TSBâs migration was something else but theyâre slowly getting there, I have accounts with TSB and to be honest, I mustâve been one of the lucky ones cause everything works fine for me but theyâre on a ânewerâ operation system rather than renting from LBG. I use tsb for my savings and mortgage and Barclays for the rewards.
Most banks need to update their systems into this century, if Monzo can do this with their customer numbers vs for example Barclays with their customer numbers, they should easily do it but they might be scared incase a fiasco like what happened at TSB happens to them
The system is newer but not really less-complicated. In fact, much of it was coded in Spain by Sabis (Sabadellâs in-house IT group) which is now a bit of a headache for TSB.
It was designed to be a bit more modular, so it is easier to add new features, but under the hood it is quite complicated and it does seem to be relatively unreliable even now - 2 and a half years on.
TSB is the cautionary tale for traditional banks in terms of IT migration.
I think the key difference is that, as you say, Monzo are willing to launch a MVP rather than go through the more QA approach of other banks.
However, this often seems to be the point that Monzo stop development and move on to something else, rather than improve that product over time - hence joint accounts missing so many features that launched for sole accounts years ago.
Yet Halifax text me 12 hours after all my direct debits have done out, and my standing order has gone in, to advise I âmight be overdrawnâ, Barclays text me my latest balance which is often inaccurate, Barclaycard text me my current balance but often miss recent payments, and Lloyds told me it takes 5 working days to change the phone number notifications are sent to.
Edit - and when I had a Natwest account, you could only get your balance sent by SMS once a week and it came with the caveat that it was up to 3 days old.
So, yeah, they mightâve had a system in place, but it still wasnât real time.
MVP and QA arenât opposite ends of the spectrum though. You can quite easily have an MVP which meets basic criteria, which has been through rigorous QA to ensure that it meets the brief and customer needs. Itâs odd that youâre suggesting Monzo somehow sacrifice QA?