As much as I love Monzo… The customer service is not at all ready for acting as a ‘real’ bank. My account was frozen on Friday, basically because i added too much money to my account and needed to verify it, which is fine. But having tried to contact customer service I was told that because its a bank holiday I might have to wait a while for them to get back to me… They still have not done this, which has meant I have had no access to money over the bank holiday weekend. This simply would not happen at one of the larger banks. I’ve also had problems with Monzo sending my card to the wrong address in the past.
Please employ more staff if you want people to start using Monzo as their primary bank account!
Playing Devils advocate OP, but most people on here have a legacy account too. Were you able able to use that? Or a credit card? Short term for a few days? (Appreciate there are people who won’t have that luxury btw, but that unlikely to be the case if you’ve transferred so much you hit a fraud check).
I tried to complete a balance transfer on Thursday and messed it up royally because I forgot to activate the card I was using to complete the transfer.
Tried calling Friday - all lines closed due to Bank holiday. Saturday compliance closed (because I somehow hit a fraud trigger) so at that point I decided to leave it until Tues/Weds. This was Lloyd’s Bank.
My point being I think in all banks specific departments are closed over bank holidays (which is where the name comes from, after all!)
You’d think that with the name ‘bank holiday’ wouldn’t you. But NatWest actually froze my account because of the large payments to Monzo, I contacted them and within 20 minutes the account was ‘defrosted’.
Also in regards to a legacy account, i don’t actually know what that is I’m just a normal user of Monzo with the new debit card. I’ve been using Monzo for a while and really do think its great, I just think it could really improve on a couple of things like this if it wants to be regarded as your primary account.
In no way should someone have to not be able to have access over an entire weekend for depositing money into their account.
Genuinely left with no money, which is probably my own fault for depositing a large amount but I was trying to set up a lifetime ISA before the end of the tax year so had to deposit quite a bit through to Monzo as my NatWest account isn’t linked to my skipton building society… Its a very long story.
Hmm was it the skipton LISA? I actually failed to deposit within 30 days so they closed mine.
Fair enough I can see why you’d be frustrated. I have a few credit cards and a very full (real) coin jar, and would have used those. A few years ago I lost all my money, cards and ID while on holiday and I survived that, so I suppose I do have unique perspective on this one.
Urgh, sounds like an absolute nightmare. Can see why it triggered something if this was unusual behaviour on your account but doesn’t make it any easier ️
I’m really sorry to hear about this and I will feed this back to see what we can do differently next time.
I haven’t looked at your account but it sounds like we were waiting for a specialist or engineer to look at a bug on your account which can result in longer wait times out of hours.
We’re really aware of how inconvenient this is and I’m so sorry that it affected you so badly.
Compliance people (@anon44204028?): Why do banks freeze the whole account and not just hold the incoming funds as pending while they carry out AML/KYC checks?
With KYC they may allow some use of an account pending completion of account opening ID checks, more so deposits than withdrawals, but normally only low values.
High value transactions triggering AML checks tend to freeze the whole account, the logic being until the source or reason for deposit known it could be money laundering, and if one transaction is proven to be money laundering it draws into concern the potential source of other funds in the account that were previously accepted without triggering an AML check.
The main issue is compliance with “tipping off” regulations, if you freeze the one transaction on it’s own it could warn someone and they then withdraw any funds not frozen. By freezing the whole account it stops anyone guilty of money laundering draining the rest of their funds, which potentially also criminal. Even if the other funds were not specifically proven to be from money laundering they could be from other crimes.
These steps are great from a crime fighting point of view but they do obviously have a (hopefully short term) detrimental impact on honest law abiding citizens.
My only concern is banks need sufficient staff at weekends and bank holidays to carry out checks promptly to avoid unnecessarily delaying someone’s access to funds that prove to be rightfully theirs.
So if you’re expecting incoming funds on a non-bank day, ask the sender to send no more than what you’d typically get as your salary, then to send the rest on a bank day? Or would chunks from the same sender still trip the automatic freezing, locking you out at a time when COps/compliance/engineer staff may be reduced?
I’m not sure - I receive incoming transfers of £4.5K twice a year for tuition fees and was never picked out of my account. Probably because I have a direct debit set up through my university - I think banks evaluate risks on a case-by-case basis.
sorry there is no hard and fast answer to that one, it depends on the bank (and in some cases the branch), the account type, transaction type, and the individual account holder. I am not party to Monzo rules, but guess they have a mix of set thresholds and algorithms.
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