Oh I’m ready!
I made the bet and I’ll stand by it. I’m more than happy to pay for 1/382nd of a paper towel sheet for @N26throwaway to enjoy.
Oh I’m ready!
I made the bet and I’ll stand by it. I’m more than happy to pay for 1/382nd of a paper towel sheet for @N26throwaway to enjoy.
For me, it’s simple. As i’ve said before - football referee who often gets cash or a cheque so this will be VERY welcome, but the £1000 cash limit is still a total PITA, even more so as the local Post Office is only open 2 days a week for paying into Starling, so had to go and open a RBS account as its the only branch available 5 days a week where I live… remember when this used to be easy?!
Can’t wait for the “Monzo closed my account 'cause I paid in a cheque” posts!
I don’t think there’s a list of things that would tempt me back, I think I’ll forever be sceptical of Monzo even if TS send everyone £1000. I just wish someone implemented shared tabs as well as Monzo do, the only feature keeping me around.
But to stay on topic, the cheque imaging update would be welcome. The more choice the better for customers. The only thing more antiquated than cheques was having to mail them in.
I guess the thing is that people are fickle. Other banks are offering better interest rates, cashback, cash incentives etc.
I think its also true to say the other apps have moved on. Pending transactions are certainly clearer than they were.
I personally moved away due to being a but underwhelmed by plus, and LBG offering better interest with Vantage. I then moved to virgin as they has better rates yet, and no foreign purchase or ATM fees.
For me having to have a second account for cheques (i used Starling when i was with Monzo) wasn’t ideal and fid make me question his sustainable that wss (Starling would have been within thier rights to say im not profitable and close my account)
I’ve got very used to having Starling solely to scan my cheques in for ages now. I’ll probly keep using Starling, mainly due to some of the horror stories on here where Monzo have been over zealous with “suspicious” transactions and frozen accounts etc. I hasten to add mine are all above board & legal, but I’ve lost a little confidence in Monzo now, and see the benefits of having ‘secondary’ accounts, just in case. Sad but true!
It literally happens with all banks. I saw a post on Reddit the other week with starling closing an account as well.
Always best to have a little reserve money on multiple accounts just in case though.
Thus far no update
While joining the scheme is probably harder for a company of the technical prowess of than the app updates, I find it hard to believe that the latter is running that far ahead of the former
It wouldn’t surprise me if it was all just behind a feature flag
As far as I know, they don’t actually have to join the scheme to process cheques - they could use a correspondent bank instead, such as NatWest (the bank they use for clearing their postal cheques). However, it would make sense to join ICS so they would no longer need to deal with a correspondent bank at all.
The main Monzo sort code has been marked as accepting cheques as per the Pay UK sort code checker, which you can see in the screenshot I posted earlier. This is the real first step towards acceptance, as they wouldn’t even be able to test the feature (other banks wouldn’t accept presentation of their cheques for payment) unless the Monzo sort codes accepted cheques.
I can quite imagine that, as Monzo would probably be perfectly happy to keep on working with NatWest on this, just removing the worst physical aspects
They may well be, yes.
The actual imaging code is not that difficult to do, it removes the manual aspect of dealing with the physical cheques and scanning them, and the whole cheque system now works thorough clearing images anyway - so to have the feature in-app is not that different from now, potentially, except it removes labour-intensive manual work which is probably a cost saving vs time spent to add the feature to the app.
ICS has some per-cheque costs, as I understand it, but also initial membership costs and various one-off setup costs which, volume-wise, may not be worth it for a bank expecting relatively low cheque volumes. So a partner bank is possibly the way to go.
On the other hand, if you have control of your own processes from start to finish, you can optimise them better and you are no longer held hostage to (probably) a fixed per-item cost for your partner to process it. Other than the initial setup costs and a small maintenance cost to factor in, the ongoing cost to run the feature is then very low - and far lower than paper cheques.
We don’t know how far they got last time. Maybe they had it almost there but missed test slot etc, or maybe they had it working as proof if concept, or maybe they barely started.
Its possible that some of the aspects have been outsourced or libraries brought in.
Would be good to see an official comment, maybe its very close or maybe work has barely started.
I think they had barely started last time (that may even have been publicly mentioned, I can’t recall if it was part of the official announcement or speculation here) because what you basically do is pick your “onboarding slot” and work backwards from that window to make sure you meet it. If you know it is going to take only 6 weeks or so to do the necessary work, you obviously start around 10 weeks ahead of the slot, to give yourself plenty of time. You don’t start now if the next slot is in 6 months though!
My reading of it last time was that the same team that had this feature on their to-do list was also working on other stuff. Some of that stuff took longer than expected, then they suddenly realised they were going to not have enough time to meet their slot. So they deferred to the next slot, the team moved on to other stuff again, and the same sort of thing happened. Then they thought “this feature isn’t high priority, there is always going to be other stuff on, we’ll just cancel it” which was more or less the undertone to the cancellation announcement.
Of course, since then, Monzo as both a product and company has matured, it also has a far larger staff-base and it has probably got easier to implement this feature too (learning from other banks, I imagine that ICS have improved their onboarding processes over time) so the value calculation is different and they’ve decided to come back to it. It probably helps that so many other banks also now support it, so there is a certain pressure from customer expectation that perhaps wasn’t there before.
You don’t want your customers talking about how great Monzo is, then their friend going “what about cheques” and the customer having to say “oh, you post them in” when the friend will find that very poor compared to their on-the-surface “more digital” bank which lets them take a picture of the cheque.
As @ndrw said:
the cheque imaging update would be welcome. The more choice the better for customers. The only thing more antiquated than cheques was having to mail them in.
And well said it was too!
It’s still a waste of time and money in my opinion.
People are creatures of habit. If they’ve found a way to live without cheque imaging for so long they will continue to use that method. Using Starling just for cheques has been mentioned a few times and it’s win-win for Monzo when the money ultimately ends up with them regardless.
I also can’t see cheque imaging being a deal-breaker when opening a bank account for most. So it’s hardly going to attract a bunch of new customers either.
Which tips around to the point @SebH made that I had not thought of around potentially sticking with NatWest. Would acknowledge that it is not super critical, but still better than now and not super expensive
Definitely nowhere near as critical to bring fully in-house as the likes of card payments and bank transfers
Definitely nowhere near as critical to bring fully in-house as the likes of card payments and bank transfers
Aimed entirely at the void, where did Starling get to with such things?
Admittedly before the pandemic when I left them, but they were still lumbering along with GPS. I imagine they wished for the same path as Monzo, leaving shambolic third parties behind
It’s not really about Monzo saying “Look, we’ve got in-app cheque processing”
It’s all about the competition not being able to sling mud at Monzo for not having it.
Remove all negative-sell points and you have a superior offering.
I also can’t see cheque imaging being a deal-breaker when opening a bank account for most. So it’s hardly going to attract a bunch of new customers either.
We’re in a bit of a banking enthusiast echo-chamber of sorts here though.
How many of us only have one bank account for instance? I’d bet not many. But most of the folks I know outside of this little bubble. The folks who care little about banking or money generally. Well they only have one bank account. And I’d bet they’re the majority of folks out there. They’re certainly the majority of my social circle.
For those folks, a feature as mundane as this that’s considered a basic requirement by many could be make or break. For their only bank account to lack that fundamental feature which is still relied on quite a bit in this country, and even moreso in the US (to the point Monzo will be offering checks too over there), I’d say it could be quite a deal breaker.
And for the criticism of those reneging on an old intention to go full monzo in the wake of this feature, it’s uncool and a little ignorant of the situation and timescale involved in the impending arrival of it. This thread was started over 7 years ago. A lot has changed in that time. Both with monzo, and the competition, both for better, and for worse. It’s a nonsensical notion the dealbreakers would remain exactly the same over all that time, and through all the changes and transformations Monzo has been through in that time.
It’s better parity with the rest of the market in terms being feature complete. And for some that will be enough. For many, it won’t be anymore, even if it may have been last decade.
We’re in a bit of a banking enthusiast echo-chamber of sorts here though.
The same can be said for your social circle It’s different in mine.
I’ve not seen any other bank boasting they have it over Monzo and we’ve had the discussion on here loads. Regulars and new users. They get the odd cheque once in a blue moon and it would be nice to scan it in Monzo, but does it really matter in the grand scheme of things? I think not.