While I personally think fractional trading is a really positive step, and I know it’s not exactly new but is becoming more main stream I truly think it is going to lead to millions of pounds left unclaimed in the long run.
Their will be loads of accounts opened in the hype and then forgotten about. £5 here and their and people’s interest will drop.
I see more and more of the challenger banks also offering Bit coin and the likes. I am glad Monzo has not went down that path. You need to walk before you crawl and we (Monzo) are still very new to the banking world.
I’d love to see this feature on Monzo. Hargreaves Lansdown (I think the UK’s the largest) charges up to 12 pounds a trade, and the app could be so much better. Monzo has the platform to potentially get younger people investing, and could be an area where they could really make some money whilst undercutting the traditionals. I would love to see an index linked fund option as an alternative to Monzo’s saving pots
Now this is interesting. UK-US transfers (and vice versa) are now available at no cost on Cash App.
If they can launch cards here, they might be able to get some traction. Their UK app hasn’t had any meaningful updates for a long time.
They have already launched a debit card for US customers. It is a nice black customisable card. It gives free ATM withdrawals if you have direct deposit with them. The cool feature is “boosters”. It offers % or fixed amount discount when the card is used to purchase at select merchants.
Yep, a few friends in the US have it. Be cool if they launched it here - the UK app doesn’t do a great deal at the moment - just P2P.
They are expanding their services into debit card, bank account with direct deposit, stock trading with fractional shares, crypto trading and boosters.
Are you referring to features being added to their US offering, or are they actually expanding these to the UK too? Because if Cash UK gets feature parity with the US, it’ll be awesome. I’ve been lusting for their debit card for many years.
I refer to the features offered to US customers.
Only affects US customers it seems, but worrying stuff. Was chief among my concerns with the onboarding approaches taking by Starling and Monzo back in the early days. I recall quizzing them on Twitter about how they defend against such a threat. Don’t recall the answers, but I remember feeling peeved with Starling because they dismissed the validity of the threat and had no straight answer after months of trying to fob me off and hope I’d forget and go away. Unsurprisingly they had a similar stumble, only not quite to this mass extent, and was seemingly innocent.
Disgruntled employees are among the biggest security threat companies face; they’re an eventuality. Yet very few, in the fintech space in particular, take it as seriously as they should. That’s concerning, and it’s how we end up with situations like this. A breach that was foreseeable, yet preventable.
Do you see this type of thing as a bigger threat at Monzo and Starling than at more established banks? If so, why?
Not necessarily, but I think they’re more exposed to it for a number of reasons:
- their infancy
- their structure
- the way they process and store sensitive data, particularly for on boarding.
Startups tend to overlook things that more established companies have had a long time and enough experience to think through and get right. That’s why you tend to see them getting into trouble quite a bit when they grow so fast, as has happened to both Monzo and N26 in the fintech banking space. N26 have also fallen victim to a similar data breach reported here. Monzo is probably a matter of when rather than if too.
I strongly suspect, and my experience trying to get an answer out of Starling back then affirms it, that it’s not an issue they even considered when building their approach. So no one had an answer.
Monzo, like N26 back then, have no real bug bounty program either. They lack the finances to fund one, and I suspect that’ll cost them greatly down the line, but that’s a different threat. One I also believe they’re more vulnerable to than the big guys.
Hindenburg revealed their next victim:
Block shares plunge after Hindenburg says Jack Dorsey’s company facilitates fraud
“former Block employees estimated that 40%-75% of accounts they reviewed were fake, involved in fraud, or were additional accounts tied to a single individual.”
I’ve recently signed up to Cash App and allowed access to my contacts. On my phone, I’ve got Monzo set up as a contact with its phone number and help@monzo email address (under the name Monzo).
I noticed that someone has somehow been able to sign up with the help@monzo.com address on Cash App and is appearing as AMiR FARD & Co Global Holdings - never heard of this company/name before signing up … Not sure how they’ve done this as Cash App requires a validation code sent to an email.
Obviously a clued up person would see this name and not recognise it, but there’s potential for scams to occur. I’ve reported the account anyway…
They do [now] send verification emails… strange… Maybe in 2020 (when the above user joined), they didn’t validate emails?
Just some further proof that the Amir company isn’t saved in my contacts, and the email is indeed linked/named as Monzo in my contacts.
Obviously, an immediate fix for me is to remove the email from the contact and it won’t appear in Cash App anymore - but it would still display for others (maybe try it yourself and see if you see the same results?)
I can’t replicate this. I also cant find this person when I try searching for a person or business.
It’s also odd that it’s showing an email where the cash tag is supposed to be! Cash App isn’t supposed to expose a user’s email. But nothing seems to exist with cash tag help@monzo.com either, which would be a pretty clever way to try to defraud people honestly.
What is the actual cash tag so I can find the user and report them to Monzo?
Hmm yeah I just checked it again, it seems like there’s no Cash Tag associated with it anymore! I did report it a couple of days ago, so it might just be remnants in my app’s cache - especially if you can’t replicate it.
I think it was exposing the email because I had it saved in my contacts, unsure!
What an odd one!
How strange!
Cash app doesn’t present any personal data for my contacts to me. I just see their cash app name and their cash tag, along with the in your contacts thing being green.