The ability to tell monzo to have all payments outside of a bill pot take from a specific pot if not enough in main account or take from a specific pot first then if more is needed take from main balance.
Scenario #1
Goto shop and pay by card you have £5 in your main balance but £100 in a reserve pot the payment is for £25 take the 10 from the main balance then the rest from the reserve pot (or the extra is transferred to main balance as part of the transaction similar to bill pots)
Scenario #2
Set reserve pot as default money location or default location for specific transactions (Sainsbury’s for example) so that you goto shop and pay by card it comes out of the reserve pot by default and anything over the amount of that pot is then taken out of main balance or transferred to the pot on the fly from main balance to cover the extra similar to how bill pots extract to main balance as part of transaction
Scenario #3
You make a payment that you know is going to take a while so you put that money into the reserve pot transfer eventually comes through but you don’t have enough in main balance, the extra required is taken from the reserve pot to cover the transaction
From memory, Monzo has something like 400 milliseconds to authorise a transaction so a whole tree of decisions like this (or even one) just isn’t practical.
Pointing the card at a specific pot before a transaction and authorising (or not) based on the amount in the chosen pot should be possible but I feel that’s about all that would be practical.
Considering pots are a virtual concept inside of Monzo not subject to the delays of a regular account there should be almost no delay at all in the backend that would make it go so slow that it’s not feasible in realtime.
I’m a programmer, cloud engineer and work for an online back myself, unless they have poorly programmed backend systems (which I sincerely doubt) it is more than possible.
A pot is not a physical entity, as I understand it all the money is in a single account if you have £100 total in your account scattered amongst pots you still have £100 in that account (the only real exception to this are savings pots which are truly separate accounts masquerading as a pot) it would take thousandths of a second to to say “main balance + pot balance is equal to or more than amount that wants taken out, sure go ahead an authorize payment” then they adjust their virtual total amount for the “main balance” and “pot balance” accordingly
You took the words out of my mouth, or off my keyboard…
I’ve been using Monzo for a few months and just moved my wife & daughter across as well. These set of features you mentioned are exactly what I created this account to provide as suggestions.
A separate reserve pot would be an absolute hit if created. I can park my savings there each month and not require an overdraft facility, as Monzo should be able to ‘dip in to’ that reserve for any amounts exceeding main account balance.
It’s not just the time element that’s a constraint. Monzo have also explained that there’s a regulatory hurdle to overcome with regard to allowing a card deduct money from a pot. Essentially there’s tighter regulations for spending accounts.
You can register for a free developer account, in order to get a little extra control.