I don’t think any of us can say with certainty that “they knew what it was before they announced they would be signing up”. I can well imagine that they read the headlines of the code and knew they would be signing up at that point (and said so), but didn’t realise until they got to the nitty-gritty of things that they would effectively be subsidising the dinosaur banks.
That I can imagine this is because in my own life I’ve had experiences of telling people “I’m going to sign up to [thing]…” (be it a club, an event, a product etc) only to later not do so because reading the small print during the process of signing up has revealed something that has put me off.
tl;dr, only Monzo can say what they did or didn’t know at that point in time.
I have noticed recently that when making transfers to new payees, my Nationwide account asks 2 or 3 times:
“Are you sure that this transfer is legititimate?”
Fairly easy thing to implement, but, to charge the banks for the privilege of trying to prevent fraud is a bit unfair
I would imagine it’s real headache for the older banks to implement. The check is simple enough but most legacy banks let you type whatever you liked and it allowed you to describe the account eg Jeff (Monzo) . I would guess they’re all going to have to expand that process to add a description as well as a name.
It still sounds easy till you think of the millions of accounts impacted and the migration of that data. Monzo use a modern platform, as do starling, so it will be easier for them.