Consolidating outgoing & incoming transfer contacts

I have a friend who I regularly transfer to and receive money from (Lets call them Robert Smith for this example), using my Monzo account.

When I send them some money I use Payments > Bank Transfer, and enter a name. I’ll name them “Bobby” or something, enter card details, amount, and it’s done. They then show up under Payments > Recents, labelled as “Bobby”. I can tap on them, and it shows their linked account, and historical transactions. OK.

Then when they send me some money back, they show in the Home tab, but only as “R Smith”. I assume this name comes from the bank at the other end, but tapping the transaction clearly shows the bank account and sort code match those from my outgoing transaction labelled “Bobby”. Furthermore, when I drill down on one of these incoming transactions, the outgoing transactions I send to them are listed, but they don’t show up as “R Smith”, they show up as “Bobby”.

Partly confusing, partly annoying. So, can these two types of transfer be consolidated? Ideally, if I have transferred someone money and given them a name, whenever anything comes in or goes out to that account, it should display that same name. I’m just looking at it today, and I have outgoing money going to someone, and then immediately above it, incoming money from the same person, and they have different names. It would be great, if a contact has been set up through bank transfer, the app could list anything incoming or outgoing relating to that account, under one name.

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Completely agree! Hopefully when the payment management work is complete (Add Payees Easily) this will be fixed. I have the same issue, my other bank adds some extra nonsense to end of incoming payments names to denote the type of account and it’s in all caps (eg J SMITH/STU), so they look even worse… The app must understand them as a single entity because the “your history with X” section is correct.

Basically, do it like Starling, which matches incoming payments to stored payers and displays those details.

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The same also applies to my employer. When my wages are paid in, it shows as one thing, but claiming for expenses is done separately, via a bank transfer, and that shows up with a different name too. I don’t know if the originating bank accounts are the same, but since you can link multiple accounts to a single person, it would make sense to do this for committed spend transactions as well.