Buffer/reserve pots and vender targeting

Feedback & Ideas
1

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

2

It can’t do this because you can’t add things to the flow (that’s not the right word, but I can’t remember it) of how a transaction happens.

It takes seconds and every IF(this, then do this) slows it down.

It’s a good idea, mainly for #2 but you have to it after the fact.

3

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.

4

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

5

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.

6

I wouldn’t mind an after the fact approach tbh, or a pay back from pot button on transactions. It’s something N26 did that I really miss.

7

You can do it with IFTTT

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8

Thanks. I still need to delve into some of the IFTTT integrations. Would be nice to have such things internalised without the need to use a third party though.

9

IFTTT is far too limited in its triggers I tried it again realised why I didn’t use it again and deleted it

10

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.

11

I’ve spent some time thinking about this since my last contribution here, and depending on how Monzo deal with this on the backend, there is (I think) a way to achieve this without taking any additional steps. I’ll try to explain.

Traditionally with a pot, Monzo are essentially segregating your funds away, so they are separate from your actual account. But if this pot balance were to be treated by Monzo as essentially part of your overall account balance, but just appear as if they’re in their own pot on the front end in the app, when the payment is going through, it will still be able to view this as available balance, and go through normally without any extra steps or any form of time delay. This is theory of course, as I don’t presently have the resources to build my own little bank and test.

But this got me thinking, what if this could be handled by Summary, rather than an actual pot. Whereby in summary, you can denote a specified amount as a personal buffer, and it will hide (deduct) that amount from your available balance on the main transaction feed in the app. You can always view the buffer in summary. Whenever new funds get added, they replenish the buffer first. If you ever dip into your buffer, this could be displayed similarly to dipping into your overdraft.

I also feel like this would be a more logical realisation of the sort of feature OP requested here. Using a pot for this thing wouldn’t be as intuitive as it could in my opinion, and seems like it should be something more associated with summary and budgets.

It might help deal with any regulatory hurdle too given that the funds are essentially still part of your main account balance, they’re just sort of hidden on the front end.

Just a few ideas that have sprung to mind when thinking about this idea, because I like the concept, I think it could be useful, and I think if it can be done, it would be relatively unique, because, as far as i am aware, it’s never been done before.

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