Since it’s Christmas, and people may be receiving cheques as gifts at this time of year, I thought it may be helpful to bump the following information:
Monzo don’t currently support Cheque Imaging, so if you want to pay a cheque in to Monzo please make sure you follow the instructions in the app before posting it. It will also likely take some time to be processed.
Alternatively, you may also have an account with another bank which may allow you to pay in the cheque using your phone. For more on this, see the list below.
Great post. As a branchless bank I think Monzo really need to revisit in app cheque imaging or alternatively offer a Post Office cheque deposit service. I don’t get cheques often but I want Monzo to offer a secure deposit method other than posting a cheque.
Might as well remove Tesco Bank from your list since they don’t have current accounts anymore.
I answered no to this. I used Starling and then transferred the money over to my monzo account.
Now initially that might seem like a great thing for monzo, as they still get my money and a cut of the transaction fees when I spend it without them having to process the initial cheque(s).
However, the lack of cheque imaging in the monzo app directly led me to opening an account with one of their competitors, which in turn gives that competitor stronger chance of winning me over to using them for my “main” account. Previously there was little chance of this as I didn’t have an account with them.
Cheque imaging may not be very lucrative feature in of itself, and even if volumes are declining it still has value for a lot of people.
If you imagine customer volumes and retention as a leaky bucket, how monzo processes cheques is definitely one of those leaks. All that being said I’m sure monzo are well aware of what “leaks” exist and which if any deserve their attention and prioritisation.
For me this would just be a nice to have feature and would probably lead me to close down my Starling account.
I thought about doing that, but then decided to leave them in both because my earlier post had initially included them (and I was quoting it) and because I wanted to make it clear that Clubcard Pay+ doesn’t allow money to be paid in via cheque imaging. That’s probably obvious though so I think you are right!
I’m sure you are not the only one, and I’ve made this same point in the past. I can only assume it’s something Monzo are factoring in and they must have estimated that the cost of developing cheque imaging support is still too great to be worth it. Eventually, as it becomes more of a standard feature, I think they will end up offering it to ensure they continue to appeal to a wide range of users.
No, not specifically.
However, what did get mandated by government was the closure of the old paper-based cheque clearing system. This was separate from the introduction of app-based imaging, but it did mean that all of those banks had to join the ICS (Image Clearing System) to continue processing cheques. Since they were all clearing banks, they were not likely to simply drop cheque support.
They therefore had no real choice but to join the ICS and start clearing all cheques via images, instead of on paper, and once this was done it was only a relatively small amount of extra work to add in-app imaging support for the initial image capture.
As @Carlo1460 alludes to, in the context of political pressure and discontent over branch closures, adding app support was also a good way to “throw a bone” to people who used cheques a lot and justify further branch closures by allowing banks to say that there was “no need” for branches to pay in cheques.
That’s another thing that the traditional banks do to “allow” for branch closures. It’s effectively the price to pay for them to avoid having closures blocked by regulators.
That’s what Monzo will be afraid of others doing, eventually, if people really want this feature.
I suspect that only a fairly small proportion of their customers so far are bothered about cheques, but as they start to pick up customers from a wider demographic as they continue to grow it may become more of a problem.
Just wanted to add to this as I started to receive monthly cheques and the Monzo posting way seems like a nightmare. Because of this I opened a Barclays account in 10 min, payed in my cheque with taking a picture of it and in about 20 min I have the money on my account.
Seems like Monzo is really behind on this one, which is a shame
Behind would imply that Monzo are slow to implement things that people want, which isn’t the case.
Monzo did the research to implement this years ago, but made a business decision not to do so based on waning usage particularly amongst the customer demographic.
I haven’t received a cheque for years, and suspect that’s the case for most people, so instead engineering resources were allocated to things that more customers would potentially use.
A lot of people ask for cheque imaging. Its hardly an unwanted feature and is probably more useful than some of the other features that have been released.
There aren’t a lot on here asking for it compared to how many customers Monzo have.
Also, I voted for it because sure why not If I do get a random cheque one day it would be nice, but from a business perspective is building something like this for customers to use once or twice a year (if that) worthwhile.
I do think that it will come one day, but there are far more important things to be allocating resource on that are more beneficial in my opinion. So it’s likely on the “nice to have” list.
If I do get a random cheque one day it would be nice, but from a business perspective is building something like this for customers to use once or twice a year (if that) worthwhile.