I’m Rupert, a member of the Payments team. I’m excited to announce that from today, you can pay cash in at the Post Office!
We know this is something that you’ve asked about for quite a while. I even found this request back in 2017
As we don’t have physical branches, we know how important it is to offer a solution to depositing cash. We partnered with PayPoint in 2018 and are now expanding our cash deposit offering to partner with the Post Office.
The Post Office has over 11,500 branches in the UK with 99% of people living within 3 miles and 90% of people living within 1 mile of a branch. All 11,500 branches will be able to accept deposits. Plus, you can still deposit cash at over 28,000 PayPoint locations. We hope this means that it will be easier than ever for you to pay cash into your Monzo account.
A few practical things about depositing cash at Post Office branches:
You can pay £5-300 per transaction into your Personal, Joint or Business account.
You can deposit a maximum of £1000 over a 180 day period (or £500 if you have a 16/17 year old account).
There is a £1 flat fee per transaction unless you have Monzo Plus or Premium. Monzo Plus customers get 1 free deposit per month. Monzo Premium customers get 5.
You’ll receive the funds immediately.
Cash deposit limits are shared across PayPoint and the Post Office. While the current limits work for the vast majority of our customers, we know they’re too low for some. We hear you and we’re working with a bunch of different teams internally to try to increase the limits and will update you as soon as we can.
Let me know if you have any questions and I’ll try my best to answer them. Happy depositing!
A shame about the fee though, as if I go as far as the Post Office, I might as well use a different card that won’t charge me for depositing cash.
For PayPoint I was/am happy to pay £1 for the convenience though and I still use Monzo to deposit cash because I have 3 PayPoints between me and the nearest Post Office.
I’ve never paid cash into my Monzo account in all the years I’ve had it, I don’t see that changing anytime soon but this is a great upgrade for those that do.
Question… One of the theories/reasons mentioned as to why this couldn’t/wouldn’t happen was the types of cards, have you silently been updating them? Or was that never an issue?
Interesting question @Revels. I was never sure if it was because the cards needed to all be debit cards (back when Monzo prepaid cards still existed) or something else. In theory, the chip can be updated via the scripting process so it should only need cards which support scripting and a BIN which the Post Office has whitelisted, I think?
Also, does this mean Monzo is joining LINK?
I thought LINK processed everything that went through the Post Office?
Good memory! Previously the Post Office had a requirement which would have meant we’d have to update and re-issue all our cards. Luckily they’ve now removed this requirement so no card updates needed
This is a great step to parity with other banks that allow Post Office deposits, but keeping the £1 fee is disappointing. I can understand it for PayPoint (I don’t believe cash deposits into NatWest via PayPoint is common, or with other high street banks), but most (if not all) other banks don’t charge for deposits via The Post Office (up to a certain limit) so why is Monzo?
Not that i’ve done any cash deposits since having my account, but knowing I would need to pay (if I didn’t have Plus) is disappointing when I could just deposit into my NatWest account and transfer it, all for free.
I get that for a lot of people, the request for post office deposits were a proxy for free deposits, but there is ultimately still a cost to banks for providing this service, just as with Paypoint.
Swings and roundabouts I guess. Monzo offer other services for free that NatWest charge for. Foreign transactions for instance. I’ve not deposited cash in any bank account for over a year. On the other hand, I’ve made many foreign transactions in that period (not through travel, just buying things on the internet). The things that are free on Monzo but not with other banks are far more useful to me than cash deposits. And they have to recover costs somewhere.
That’s very true. Didn’t think about that.
It’s still a great step in the right direction and believe it will help plenty of people who can now use The Post Office. Doesn’t directly affect me as I haven’t deposited cash in years, plus have Plus so I have 1 fee deposit a month anyway if I did ever need to.
