I have no idea. I just like tapping my monzo card - it’s easy. I don’t like installing apps - it’s a security risk and I can’t guarantee my phone won’t run out of power/break/be stolen when I’m miles from home.
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From a personal point of view, if I lose my card, the absolute most anyone can spend is £100. That’s before you think about me noticing a notification (if I’m awake) or how much I’ve already spent on contactless before a reset.
If they take £100, that isn’t going to leave me unable to eat/heat, it’s just annoying having to do the admin to get it back.
I do appreciate that it may cause more problems for others. This is definitely going to reopen the debate about being able to set the limit yourself.
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Keep it old school 
At least you’re not getting the change bag of coins out and holding up the whole bus
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Then don’t. I think you are making this a big deal in your head when the reality doesn’t match.
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I read the comments on the bbc tweet about the limit increase 
Apparently we live in the end times and this is proof
Wouldn’t this be the same across all banks? So it’s not Monzo specific?
Also I assume your money would be protected as usual.
So not sure what the issue is (provided banks are swift to refund money and then investigate).
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Not monzo specific, but this is a monzo forum; would be odd to talk about barclays here, no?
I’m sure my money is protected up to a point but I’m also sure that not every victim of theft gets all their money back in every case if it’s deemed to have taken them too long to report it, or there’s some other device they can use to get out of it paying it. We could sit and discuss how good the banks are at that sort of thing and I’m sure it would be fascinating for all concerned but I’m really only interested in technical solutions to the problem of a £100 contactless limit I have no control over. Mine is to leave my main bank account’s cards at home; fund my monzo account from that, and only take my monzo card outside, with a reduced amount on the account, and with most of that in a pot so that my card can’t be emptied in a small number of £100 transactions if it’s lost or stolen.
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That seems like a lot of steps for a very small risk.
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How many steps are you seeing? The only additional step (on top of “move money into monzo account when it drops below £200 or so”) is “use a monzo pot”. The UI for that is pretty simple; i’ve never used them before but it takes a couple of seconds to move data into/out of a pot.
Leave your bank card at home, top up Monzo, move money in/out of pots.
If you lost your card, and if the person who found it isn’t honest and if you’re at the bottom of your contactless spend, they can take some money.
Just seems like you’re trying hard to mitigate a risk that isn’t really there. You’re more likely to have your card cloned from using it online/data breach or a dodgy cash point.
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I think for this to happen you’d need to be thinking more of days or weeks
That would move you from the fraud victim to lying fraudster category in most cases
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Isn’t there some sort of hard limit in place that means you have to enter a PIN once you’ve spent something like £135 on contactless?
Isn’t this the technical solution you’re after? Though I agree with the others, your ‘risk’ is based upon an incorrect assumption that Monzo will not refund you if your card is stolen and used.
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Plenty of people talking about other banks on here.
My point really is that this will affect you regardless of which bank, it IS going to happen so if you want to find a solution then go for it.
It seems to me that Monzo actually offer an easier way to resolve the issue for you, with easy to use app to transfer money from pots to current account and freeze/unfreeze card, instant notifications etc.
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And I am happy that Santander has brought in more card controls with its new MasterCard debit card so hopefully the account with most of my money in it will be better protected if I feel concerned.
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What do Santander do that’s different to other banks?
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Nothing, but card controls were something they didn’t have until they switched to MasterCard.
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Oooh gotcha. I imagined something super fancy and futuristic 
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That’s not a feature. Anyone can do this with any bank if you set up your own limited company, become a Truelayer client, sign a deal with Mastercard, and then code your own app to create virtual cards and move the money from the assigned account through your Truelayer open banking integration. I hate how the Monzo fans always make it sound like there’s a useful feature when it actually exists for all banks with a bit of effort.
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Nope. Nothing is particularly fancy or futuristic with Santander. Everything works well, but they just look a bit outdated.
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Indeed, it’s off topic but their app is very much of the “simple and effective” variety. There’s not much there, and none of the advanced tools of Monzo et al, but it works well for what it does do.
The card freezing feature has become pretty much standard across all banks, which mitigates the danger of losing your card somewhat as you can easily and immediately freeze it as soon as you realise (so potentially before it’s ever fraudulently used). In addition, as others have said, you can dispute the fraudulent transactions and it is the bank’s responsibility to pay for them unless they can prove you’ve been “grossly negligent” with your card.
Furthermore, in the case of Monzo and some other fintechs, you can switch on location-based security so if your card is used a long way away from your phone’s current location the transaction should be declined.
In the medium to long term, it’s likely that fingerprint-authenticating cards will become the standard backup and payment via smartphone will become ever-more standard, so fraud will further reduce as contactless transactions are likely to all be authenticated. In the meantime, things like SCA risk counters further mitigate the risk.
We are unlikely to switch to tap and pin in the U.K. as we use offline PIN, not online, so this wouldn’t work (search the community for more on that).
I don’t understand this. Carrying a large cash amount would mean a virtual certainty of losing your money if you lost your wallet.
The whole point is that losing your card and ending up out of pocket is a remote possibility.
So switching back to cash makes no sense?
If concerned, you have the option to freeze and unfreeze your card; again, the whole point is that this is very unlikely to be necessary at all, but is an option if you want extra security. There is no such option with cash.
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