Chris Skinner Blog - Monzo Growing Pains

Spotted a link to this in my Twitter feed today. Thought I saw it here earlier but seems to have disappeared

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This makes A LOT of sense. And this guy clearly knows what he is talking about.

The route into a full bank account from a pre-paid card, and lack of due diligence in that process, would explain why Monzo in particular has such a high–profile problem.

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I believe it’s probably been removed, as the post was quite arsey and argumentative. So wouldn’t surprise me if it’s gone because of that.

At least you’ve posted the article up minus what was on from the last poster :ok_hand:

I didn’t see that bit :slight_smile:

I think you will find there was nothing ā€œarsey and argumentativeā€ about my last post!

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Might need Specsavers, I’ve just been though :sweat_smile: maybe I need a refund

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It’s more than likely that an overzealous member of cc thought that no one would notice.

I also find it curious (yet again) there is nothing to say it was moved the the ā€œremoved postsā€ sin bin. I don’t want to take this offtopic but this silent deleting stuff looks very shifty

Ha! Whoever flagged this needs to get over themselves

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Interesting read and a plausible theory. Though the bit about double Tesco transactions is a bit strange, isn’t that Tesco at fault and not Monzo?

I rarely shop at Tesco but never had an issue with double transaction on Monzo.

I think we see few forum posts asking about double transactions on occasions and staff have explained it is the way Tesco process payments. Though I could be misremembering.

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Isn’t it simply a case of Tesco not completing the original pending authorisation, but putting it through afresh, leading to a seemingly double debit?

The first authorisation would eventually get re-credited to the Monzo balance, but until then it’s unavailable to spend. Most other banks would ā€˜hide’ this in the ā€˜Available balance’?

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I’m going to go out on a limb and say he’s wrong. Firstly, I dispute that our KYC was ever lacking due diligence, although I won’t go into the details of how it worked for obvious reasons. But even if that was the case, in June 2017 there were heavier additional measures put in place to comply with EU AML regulation. At that time, the prepaid beta had some 250k accounts. Let’s say that 80% of those people are still Monzo customers today, so 200k people. That’s only 4% of the userbase. When you account for 30 day actives and you remove the people that barely use their accounts and thus don’t even have enough usage for there to be a chance of suspicious behaviour, you’re probably lower than 2%.

And from time I spent working on fincrime-adjacent tasks, I’d have to say there’s absolutely no chance in hell that even 50% of the accounts flagged were people who had been customers in the prepaid era. It was far, far less than that.

It reads like a plausible theory to an outsider. It’s not a plausible theory to me.

I firmly do not believe that Monzo closes or freezes more accounts than any other bank. What I do believe is that, as an app-based bank, these customers are far more social media savvy and far more likely to join such a group or kick up a stink on Twitter, compared to, say, somebody that got their account frozen with Barclays or HSBC.

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As always it’s just another puff piece from an individual who can only stab into the dark about what the issues are.

I tend to take all these with a pinch of salt.

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For someone who claims to know the industry and Monzo, he sure does get a lot wrong.

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I obviously know no more than anyone else about this but once I got to the sentence in the article saying ā€œI gave them plenty of opportunity to explain it to me and they didn’tā€ or words to that effect I lost the will to read further. Without knowing anything about the guy, I felt his own self-importance got in the way of what he was trying to say which was a bit of a shame.

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Didn’t monzo complain that they didn’t have the opportunity to explain themselves with the whole watchdog thing

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Don’t think so. They said they should have sent someone though

What could they have said they they hadn’t already?

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They aren’t going to give some guy with a blog the reason they are closing the account.

He claims to be an expert but there’s huge gaps in his knowledge that seem to be taken up with his ego.

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I doubt a guy with gaps in his knowledge would have a write up like this but hey what do I know.

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No, they said Tom was in hospital so he couldn’t appear on Watchdog, and the mistake was to not send anyone else instead.

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99.99999% of Monzo customers have absolutely no idea this is an ā€œissueā€

Nobody reads i and nobody is going to read this guy trying to drive clicks to his blog either.

It’s something that happens across all banks but aside from here, obscure sites online and that Facebook group full of morons, it’s not on anyone’s radar.

The next time you see someone with a Monzo card, aka what they think of the account closers for people that have broken T&C, if they even know about it, I’d be surprised if you get anything more than a shrug.

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