Can only request to increase transaction limit on the day of transaction?

Looking to purchase a car on Friday so have requested to increase the transaction limit through the in-app chat, and was told to make the request on the transaction day instead…

Sounds fine in theory but it took me 2+ hours to get a reply in the in-app chat during business hours, surely they should allow the request to be made and confirmed in advance? When HSBC can reply their in-app chat mostly instantly and can increase limit on the spot via phone, I am not very impressed at this point…

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Different banks have different processes I guess. I work at Barclays and we can choose the date the large transaction is being made, I would suggest you chatting them first thing in the morning or later the previous night and see if they can put the marker at that time?

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So transfer the funds to your HSBC account and withdraw it from there?

My point is not that there is no workaround, but the fact that a simple matter requires me to use another bank account to resolve.

Doesn’t Monzo have the ambition to become everyone’s main bank, or we already accepted it will just be a second bank at best with a shiny app?

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There’s a few things like that with Monzo, to be fair.

Count yourself lucky that you are trying to buy a car and not a house! We did buy our house with Monzo, but we were not in a chain so didn’t have to rely on any on the day of completion stuff. Although I don’t know if it all goes through the solicitors in that case anyway.

Anyway, point is - I completely agree if Monzo want customers to use them as their main bank, they need to sort out how they deal with these big, life event type stuff.

My mum also uses Monzo but found it all a big pain trying to pay the builders for her extension, for similar reasons.

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Lets hope the new CEO works on things like this - it is a crazy limitation to only be able to ask on the day - knowing that you will have a wait between 1 minute and 12 hours to get it raised!

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All money is deposited into your solicitors bank account before you sign your contract, you’ll also be waiting on the seller to do the same and for your mortgage money to be paid in too - so you could argue that you have few weeks. The solicitor will then exchange contracts and transfer your money to the sellers solicitor before you then move into the house on the agreed upon date. In a nutshell, if I remember correctly!

Not that this detracts from your point, just saying :smiley:

Right, so it’s the day of the transaction today, what I have done:

  • Last night stayed up till 1am to log a request to increase the limit (so it’s the day of!)
  • Set up alarm at 7am to do a quick check on the in-app chat
  • No reply unfortunately :open_mouth: sent another message to ask them to pick this up
  • 8:30am, still nothing, called Monzo support number (had to intentionally choose a few wrong options to get to a real human)
  • The bloke on the phone sounded sympathetic of my situation, says he will ask someone to pick up my request asap

I will give it another 2 hours, if it’s still nothing then I will have to transfer the funds to my HSBC account :man_shrugging:

Things like this are why I still keep a ‘normal’ bank account. When I bought my car I went into the branch a day before and took the cash out there and then. Easy.

There’s some things Monzo is brilliant at, but this sort of thing is always going to be a problem.

I agree it’s currently a problem, but I hope it doesn’t stay that way. There’s no reason for it to.

Actually got the limit increased within the hour, so all good here.

I will still try to use Monzo as my main bank but yes having a high street bank account as backup seems necessary.

Dealerships are not accepting cash at this moment.

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what car are you going for ?

I’m hopeful that as part of Monzo’s push to reduce chat inbound, they will review things like this which require users to contact support.

It makes no sense to me that I have to go through the live chat to raise a limit. The user journey (in my view at least) should be this:

  • I have a button on my limits page saying 'Request a temporary limit increase"
  • I’m presented with a form where I fill out the details: How much, to who, why, what date etc
  • I submit the form and upload a selfie with ID
  • Ideally this is then automatically approved. If Monzo feel a human always needs to be involved, the COp now knows that they should have everything they need to make a decision without going back to the customer*. This should lead to a guarantee-able turn around time for these requests.

*Obviously there will always be cases where someone fills in “None of your business” or similar to the Why question, but that’s still a pretty clear reason to decline.

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Sensible, nowhere should be accepting cash at the moment (or at least, they shouldn’t be handling accepted cash). With cash being metal or plastic, it’s a potentially a high-risk transmission vector :grimacing:

Glad to hear you got your limit increased, though I’m sorry to hear the processes for doing so still haven’t improved since it was first raised as an issue. I think someone said Starling let you do this the day before, which would seem to be a better way of doing it.

This process is a bit of a joke :confused:

I actually don’t mind so much that it needs to go through support / manual approval, but the issue is the combination of Monzo’s policy of only placing the request the day of transaction and the fact that the in-app chat support can’t guarantee a response time.

From a user perspective, either:

  1. Let us place the request and approve it in advance, maybe even just the day before
  2. Monzo needs to guarantee a maximum turnaround time in in-app chat, say 1 or 2 hours so users can plan ahead
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Thanks for the kind words mate, especially when none of this is your fault :sweat_smile:

Perhaps there are some risks associated with allowing users to request these things in advance, but I am not a risk guy so will refrain from saying something stupid. Just purely from the user perspective it seems like it needs to be improved.

I disagree that this will always be a problem. @BenLeo has a good idea of how I personally think this process should work. Limit increases are the same couple of questions (How much? What for? Etc.) so there is no reason why we couldn’t make this a slick flow as we work more on replacing this human back and forth and escalation with simple forms for the majority of cases. :slightly_smiling_face:

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I don’t mean this too negatively but I guess the point is there are lots of things for which there’s no reason that they’re a problem.

But this only seems to make it worse that they are still problems :woman_shrugging:t2: Lots of seemingly easy to fix things which, as of yet, remain neglected and unfixed.

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