I agree, I still think Monzo haven’t got their “pending” transactions 100% yet.
I appreciate that your “available” money needs reduced by this amount, and legacy banks get around it by showing you two confusing balances. While I like Monzo’s approach, I still think pending transactions are not very clear.
For a start, any transaction for which the money is released [Edit: to avoid confusion, I mean, released back to us, refunded, auths not collected] should stop showing as pending and should now be fully completed. These transactions should say anything but “pending…”… A new feed item will be created anyway if transaction is eventually collected, is there any reason for showing the original as pending? It might just be me, but every single one of these transactions in my app – going as far back as the start in October 2016 – still shows as “Pending…”. Just becomes really confusing. Worst case scenario, you can have three transactions: the final completed one, the interim refund and the original pending (though it is not really pending anymore).
Once the pending transactions are fixed, I would make them more obvious: Subtle light yellow row background on the main feed and the pending text in transaction details. This means that these transactions are obvious, without breaking the current ‘real time’ flow. People will be less prone to freak out on transactions which are clearly differentiated as not having fully gone through and I would be less inclined to hassle them via the messenger for authorisations I know will go unclaimed until they actually go white and I have actually been charged.
Finally, I’m not sure about not being notified when transactions settle for more than was expected, but I have already explained my thinking of it here