Despite having my Halifax credit card connected for a few years. Transactions older than 6 months are no longer visible. My history has been wiped out… I’m certain they were there before, but are not shown and are not available under spending on trends.
Sadly, I am starting to have serious doubts about putting faith in Monzo having had two other connected account issues with transactions not being shown in the last two weeks…
Details to reproduce:
Check Halifax Credit Card , view transactions. Older ones are not shown.
I posted here in the hope that someone from the open banking team in Monzo would take an interest, as it’s impossible to get a proper response from support on backend technical issues…
I doubt that I’ll get a resolution here, but it does make me wonder what duty of care Monzo have when it comes to storing data from open banking integrations… Does it count as a record? And as such, should it be stored for six years?
Data loss is one of the main issues I see with Monzo openbanking integration right now… the loss of data when closing a connected account throws trends out and invalidates historical totals…
We store transaction data from when the account was first connected, yes. If you disconnect the account you’ll no longer see the account or it’s transaction data in the app.
When the account is first connected, we fetch up to 3 years worth of transaction data and store that on our side. As long as the account is connected then we’ll continue to fetch more and more data on the account.
In my case, I am missing historical Halifax credit card transactions … I’m sure it has been connected for a few years, yet only shows around six months of transactions…
Losing transactions for closed accounts is a secondary problem …
This definitely isn’t working as expected then. My Halifax transactions only go back to June 2022 but I have had the card connected much much longer, and have never disconnected it.
Extracts from the recent Monzo response to a complaint regarding this:
We’re unable to uphold your complaint point about the information we store on connected accounts.
Connected account issue
At Monzo we went through a recent change in order to show our trends better for our customer. So once a customer has connected their account, we’re allowed a small window to list the maximum transaction history which that bank allows, this limit is imposed by the bank and varies for each of them. As for this instance whilst adding MBNA to a connected account we discovered their limit to be 6 months worth of transactions history.
I understand Bank Of Scotland is part of the same banking group however they do not have this 6 months limit.
This would mean as we have not made an error in regards to the connected accounts, we would not be reimbursing any of the charges for your Monzo
Premium. We would not uphold this part of your complaint.
Now, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the complaint, which was about existing data disappearing rather than new data being fetched. But this is what I got back.
I’m about to cancel Premium and go to the Ombudsman because of this.
Yes, that is correct that there are some nuances due to the change to improve trends, which include limiting the transaction history within the app semi-aggressively for some banks.
Thanks all for of your feedback on this - we’ll look at rectifying this as part of our work over the next few months and will let you know when we’ve done so.
So the issue that @caribo described is the intended behaviour?
I suggest that whoever signed off on that change - given that he is a paying customer - takes some time to think whether that was the best thing to do and, if so, whether doing it without any form of notification was the best way to do it.
What is it you are planning on rectifying? as it is not clear to me what happened to my transactions and whether your plans would ensure that this could not happen again.
My main concern here is that I am paying Monzo for the connected account service, and that service (please correct me if I am wrong) includes obtaining transactions from connected accounts and storing them on Monzo servers in perpetuity. This creates a financial record that can be used in trends to analyse my financial history over many years. Trends is practically useless if you are arbitrarily deciding to delete transactions.
Also, can you comment on the GDPR implications please? I’m no GDPR expert but there are protections that state that data should be “handled in a way that ensures appropriate security, including protection against unlawful or unauthorised processing, access, loss, destruction or damage”. In this instance it seems to me that Monzo had a record of my transactions and managed to lose them which would be a failure of duty.
We don’t arbitrarily delete transactions from Connected Accounts, we continue to store this data on our backend - we would not delete data without request or consent from our customers.
We want to ensure that Trends is accurate and provides an amazing user experience. To do so we need a consistent history of data from when the account was connected until today. This isn’t always possible, as I’ll outline below. Our current implementation enforces a consistent history by only using the amount of data we can fetch from banks that we support within Connected Accounts.
We are in an intermediary state at the moment where this restriction impacts customers who have rich transaction histories, as you have described.
We can’t assume that all customer have a consistent transaction history from when they first connected their account until today. For example, if a user has disconnected their account for a year and then reconnects it, but the bank only returns 90 days of transactions, we will have a 275 day gap in transaction data. This would severely impact the accuracy and usability of trends. There are many other scenarios where similar situations arise.
To rectify this, we can allow Connected Accounts and Trends to use as much historical data as possible but only where that data is consistently available to us. This would enable customers with rich and consistent transaction histories to have the full history available to them in Connected Accounts and Trends. Where this is not available, we can optimise to achieve a best-possible representation of the transaction history.
Thanks for the additional assurances @henryrowett and the time you have taken to come here and explain.
In my case, Im sure that my Halifax connected account has been connected consistently for years, yet somehow I can only see transactions back to March, so I’m not sure how that fits with the scenarios you have outlined. The transactions that I could see previously are now missing, that’s my point.
Maybe I’m confused about something, but not being able to rely on my transactions remaining visible to me is a major concern.
As I outlined, although you have a rich transaction history, we limit that to what we can ensure is going to be a consistent history which is currently 6 months of data for Halifax credit cards. We haven’t deleted your transactions though, we have just limited what we return.
