Competitor Update 2

[jzw95]

@Demmedelusive

I wonder how bringing this function in-house will increase reliability.

It’s also about more than just reliability. Bringing it in-house will allow features that just aren’t possible with an outsourced processor.

@daniel

This will give us the freedom to do many things that are either more difficult or not possible with the third party processor. These are some of the things I’m looking forward to experimenting with (disclaimer: there is no timeline for these):

Different card numbers on different interfaces on the card, e.g. a different card number on contactless and embossed on the front. This helps protect from fraud as details stolen from the contactless interface would be useless to a criminal.
The ability to create virtual cards from within the app and use them online.
Push notification > Click to approve 3D Secure flow
“end to end” encryption of PINs (see below)

And in that thread, I had the same question as Andre above:

@Rjevski

Does anyone know what it means to be a card “processor”?

Daniel kindly provided a diagram to show how the components fit together (click the to see the graphic):

The Monzo Weekly Diary 2.0

This diagram is very simplified but gives the rough idea. [image] The Card Network is Mastercard. The card processor is what connects to Mastercard (multiple physical cable connections) and processes the messages from Mastercard. Messages are EBCDIC encoded ISO8583 messages (we actually contributed EBCDIC code pages to the Go encoding libraries such that we could parse these in Go). The card processor is responsible for the processing of these messages.