Sorry my bad for not saying that, thank you 
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This, exactly this.
It is morally wrong in my view, and consecutive governments have allowed gambling to ruin many families lives by condoning FOBT, and the proliferation of online gambling sites which hook you in with “free” money. Highstreets are now literally littered with bookies, simply because they were allowed to take over as other retailers went bust. It’s absolutely disgusting in my view, when you walk along a street and watch gamblers walking back and forth between the banks and the bookies situated right next door!!
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I think you have also got to consider Monzo , and Starling offering this function attracts press coverage and potentially new customers , so as well as development time being spent on this feature it also sells these banks to future customers as more socially responsible than other banks - the other banks will soon be aware of the function and will perhaps change their culture just one little bit at a time as they follow Monzo and Starling
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This is a bigtime problem with online discussions. And to be fair, the original question didn’t come from a neutral point of view. Some may have misunderstood your intentions, but I feel that we should all reflect on how we pose things and respond to things (myself included)
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It is time for the UK government to clean up high street. How are bookies beneficial to the wellbeing of our communites? They are simply parasitic businesses preying on the poorest and those with mental health problems. Monzo and Starling are doing great job.
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No problem Danny, I wasn’t sure what it meant so I looked it up. As a rule of thumb I usually spell it out in full the first time with the initials in brackets and then just use the initials after that point. But we all have our little ways 
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Just to add onto why I always get so passionate about this, I used to write to MP’s and try to start petitions for this exact feature that often fell on death ears. So in response to @Mr.Chung I wish the government would list more, but it’s taxable addiction, so they will sit back and watch!
I only got 13 signatures but here is the petition from 2016 I started for this exact feature so when Monzo rolled it out, was amazing news to me: https://www.change.org/p/make-gambling-easier-to-stop-block-to-help-combat-problem-gambling
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Yeah, this! It’s totally disheartening to hear this is still continuing:
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This will be to give the bookmakers time to get together and start a huge appeal, and more than likely get the limits raised not decreased by the end of the 2 years!
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I think it’s an absolutely amazing feature. It eliminates the temptation, as gambling is just as addictive as other addictions, yet is always sidelined and seemed to not be viewed as important. It can be just as damaging as alcoholism and drug taking, yet gambling is never given the same funding and resources to help people tackle the problem as other addictions are.
I think it’s amazing that Monzo have introduced this. Legacy Banks are more bothered about introducing features to give the best experience to those they can make a profit out of. Monzo are being very socially responsible here, and I applaud them for it. This is to benefit the customers, and is another example of Monzo actually caring about the wellbeing of its customers!
Legacy Banks have treated people with difficulties and the financially excluded like dirt for too long. A perfect example is how some banks won’t even give those on a basic account a contactless card, yet will give them to kids at the age of 11!
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I don’t know if anyone mentioned (I skimmed) that the x% time is also good to reduce engineers burning out. You could have engineers work all the time on their allocated task and that alone, but people may get fed up when they have good ideas that they don’t have time to develop. It’s not as if Monzo time is a massive block (1 day a month? 1/30), and it’s better than them wasting time on social media because they don’t want to work. 12 extra days isn’t going to change much in the wider scheme of things, but 12 small projects could change a lot.
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The moral and ethical imperatives of this step are hugely interesting. I’m surprised that this hasn’t (yet) turned into a major press story. I’m sure it will.
May I ask how this works? Is there a “blacklist” of gambling vendors which is added to by request? Does it use the merchant’s keywords or business type? Does it rely on the customer naming merchants?
Who is deciding and how as to what constitutes a gambling merchant/transaction or indeed gambling per-se?
Apologies if this has already been discussed somewhere in this thread, it’s very long…
All retailers have a specific merchant category code based on their business, this is what is blocked so it’s not a judgement call
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Love the idea, think it could be used as a template to block transactions from specifc retailers as well
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In the long term, might be possible to do this yourself via rules or the API. Can’t be sure of that so don’t quote me, making a wishful guess.
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Can this also be used on Play store transactions?
The gambling block wouldn’t be able to do that. Might be worth raising the suggestion under ideas section, to see if it’s on the Monzo radar to allow additional spending blocks!
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I suspect that this would have to be implemented by Play Store.
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i would like to say thanks for putting up the website as ive just got that 1 step closer to stop gambling thanks to u
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Great news !
Hopefully ok to share this but I reached out to Monzo to set my cash withdrawals to be limited to £20 a day, to stop offline gambling too.
GamStop + Monzo gambling block + limited physical cash and it’s the ultimate hurdles to get past should there ever be temptations
Really glad the site was helpful
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