Hey folks, I had the same issue. I had used the wrong email address, and as Codf had described it was following the route for login but then getting confused.
The problem is that when you close and reopen the app it starts at the phone number form giving you no way to rectify the mistake.
Even updating the app still takes you straight to the phone field. The only way to restart is to delete the app and reinstall it.
Then you enter the correct email address (best way if you’re not sure is to search in your emails for Monzo and confirm — the ‘Your Year in Monzo’ email is a dead cert) and the rest is plain sailing.
@monzo there needs to be some way for the user to break this chain if they get stuck in the loop, or even better for the app to recognise which emails have and haven’t been used to register an account and therefore avoid the loop entirely.
Thanks David. FYI you may not need to restart your phone. I didn’t.
My point is more UX design note for the Monzo developers. Users won’t necessarily know that they’re in this loop, so I would suggest an account authentication check when an email is entered. If the email doesn’t have an account attached to it, then it should not be allowed to progress to the login function, and ergo this erroneous loop. Instead the user should be informed to check they have the correct email address and/or redirect to the create account function.
The big problem with this, as has been discussed at length previously, is that someone could phish for valid Monzo email addresses using such a method and use this test along with other phished data to access an account fraudulently.
While some sort of check would be nice, it isn’t the app at fault - it is the user for entering the wrong email address!
Isn’t that the point of securing it through a text message sent to the account holder’s registered phone? Or can phones be phished out of users hands?
Perhaps once the phone recognition has failed three successive times then that would break the loop and send the user back to reenter the email address?
This only confirms that the phone number and the email don’t work together, but that is already confirmed by the first failure of the phone number recognition. Therefore not giving any further data away.
For me I admit it was lazy. The iPhone showed me my main email address and I clicked it without thinking. I forgot that I had started using a different address for official things, such as banking. But that showed how easy it can be. If I went around a second time I would have realised, but I was stuck in the loop of death.
This only happens when initially signing up for a Monzo account. The phone number part is a stage in the sign-up flow process and is for validation purposes.
Once you are a validated user you should never ‘sign-up’ again - only log-in - and only use the correct, validated email address…
If you use an email address which is non-Monzo-validated, you are (rightly) sent to the sign-up flow because Monzo sees you as a new user
If the email address entered is Monzo-validated, you continue to use the log-in flow which results in a magic link being sent to the email address to allow the final stage of the log-in flow, followed by access to the account
You need access to the app, knowledge of the correct email address to use and also access to that email account to be able to login
You can also check if the email is good or bad by attempting to login to web.monzo.com using a browser.