Must be a surge of all the Christmas pay early people. That’s the reason I went there 
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Me too
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Just managed to execute the early payment request, reported successful but amount still greyed out. Guessing some major demand on services slowing things down - just after 4pm on the Thursday before Christmas, people trying to get Friday salaries early perhaps?
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Given it’s a multinational company I paid only a few days ago I doubt this is the issue. It must go to that account…
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As above v unlikely
Any luck now services seem to be recovering? Or still blocked?
Or everyone going to foreign ATMs
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I had to rush around and find an alternative. As I said the £5k payment was fine though.
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To follow up. I reported this on the 18th and included a screenshot of the exact (very vague) error message.
It was then radio silence for several days before finally hearing back with a check on (but no answer) on the 21st.
Another message saying please wait on the 24th then a message on 26th which I then had to ask for clarification about as they weren’t sure which FPS payee I was referring to.
Finally, 11 days later, on the 27th I got a resolution.
Apart from the very slow communication, two issues that I think are very important to highlight are the following:
-
Monzo told me the issue was logged originally by engineers on the 18th but this was not communicated to any other team and it took CS almost two weeks to track it down.
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Monzo told me they had no meaningful error message set up for this particular fail state which also made it harder for me to diagnose the problem and for them to work out what was going wrong.
In the end I was stuck overseas with no easy way to access my money (I’m currently in a country where all ATMs charge ~£8 (regardless of the card you’re using) plus a fee of approx 30%.
I was several days without cash and when I finally gave in and got money by other means my £300 transaction ended up costing me almost £400.
I’m glad this was finally sorted and it seems Monzo now know what went wrong. But several times (outside of the Xmas period) where I was waiting more than 24 hours for even an acknowledgment was not ideal.
I hope we can turn this into a learning experience for all. Does anyone have ideas about how Monzo could affordably respond to issues like this better?
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tl;dr
1. 11 days to resolve
2. Several times waiting for multiple days for a response.
3. No communication from engineers to COPS
4. Software debugging made more difficult due to lack of error handling best practices
5. Unrelated to Xmas/pay early volume.
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Sounds like you need Three, which has free roaming and an alternative means of payment such as cash.
Three doesn’t have free roaming here.
As I said, there’s no way to access cash without paying about a 30% surcharge in this country.
So if you have cash in your wallet upon landing they take a 30% cut??
There’s a limit on the amount of cash you can carry on your person.
And there’s no way I’m carrying around several months worth of cash on me for obvious reasons.
Maybe time to have a 2nd current account for a backup?
Generally there is no legal limit, the $10,000 average limit is generally a reporting limit, but in theory you could take $205,000,000.00 if you wanted to. Just report it.
Have you considered Traveler’s Checks or Travel cards?
Some banks will refund all ATM fees worldwide.
LOL yes I have. Impossible to use here and I don’t think in other places either for over a decade.
Oh and if you report it in this country there’s no way you’re getting in with much more than $10k.
Only aware of two or three and have never ever heard of this ever being a thing offered by a UK bank. If there were a UK bank I’d of course be all over it.
But even that wouldn’t help in this case due to the 25% commission that wouldn’t be refunded.
edit today it’s at 33%
Are you having the ATM do the conversation?
Of course not! This isn’t my first rodeo…
I never allow ATMs to do a currency conversion as should be well known to anyone who’s ever left the sterling zone.
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