Core App: Better payments

Morning!

Our small but mighty Core App squad is gonna be spending some time giving the payments experience a bit of much-needed love soon, and we would really appreciate your input :pray:t5:

We have a pretty good idea of the things that we would like to update and improve – it’s already a long list – but we like to know that we’re moving in the right direction and want to make sure that we’ve not forgotten anything that might be important to you. We want payments to be super easy and delightful to use!

So what things about the payments screens, flows, and overall experience do you think we could (and should) make better? :money_with_wings:

We’re going to be mainly focussing on things inside of the ‘Payments’ tab, but feel free to suggest things outside that might be related – e.g. Viewing and sharing your account details from somewhere in the payments tab rather than/in addition to the ‘Account’ screen.

We’ll be doing our best to address as many of the issues as we can but sadly can’t make any promises around timelines or specific features etc. at this stage. The current plan is to release small improvements regularly over the coming weeks though, and we’d love to hear your feedback as we go :upside_down_face:

43 Likes

This is brilliant news – thank you! I’ve written about this a few times so you may already have this on your list, but this is the only thing that frustrates me about Monzo, every month.

Request: Support more than one payee with the same bank account number.

Examples:

  • My wife and I both have a credit card with the same provider. The bank account to pay is the same, but the reference is different. Currently, whichever payment you paid most recently (I think) is used. So if I click “My Credit Card” but my wife paid last, the name switches to “Her Credit Card” and the reference switches. Since the reference is numeric, it’s hard to see. We have each paid the wrong credit card bill before now, and it’s difficult to rectify.
  • My children all have an account with the same building society. The Society has one bank account number. It is really hard to make sure I am paying the correct child. If I click “Child 2 Building Society” and even remember to update the reference to the correct one, the payment will more often than not go into the account feed as “Child 1 Building Society”. It is impossible to tell which child I have paid, and which one I have not. Different name/reference combinations all over the place.

If payments could be set up with a name, sort code, and bank account number, and if the reference could be saved with the payee, and then this was one single entity which did not conflict with any others, then that would be perfect for me.

Thanks again!

27 Likes

I have one more, less pressing, request. I would personally really like it if you did not show the options to pay random people from my contacts list. I have a lot of contacts in my phone (work colleagues, random acquaintances, etc.) who I will never need to pay. I would prefer not see their names in my payees list.

I would also prefer it if they did not see the fact that I have a Monzo account in their list either. Some of the people in my phone are complete strangers, and Monzo advertising to them that I bank with Monzo, is a piece of personal information that I would rather them not know.

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I would personally really like it if you did not show the options to pay random people from my contacts list. I have a lot of contacts in my phone … who I will never need to pay. I would prefer not see their names in my payees list.

I would also prefer it if they did not see the fact that I have a Monzo account in their list either. Some of the people in my phone are complete strangers,

Agreed with all of this.I have 126 contacts in my phone (many with multiple numbers) and of those, only less than a handful would I ever want to make payments to. Most payments to go those who are NOT in my contacts list (credit card, milk delivery etc).

On the “Recents” bit, listing date+amount of last transaction would be good (and an option to show “older payments” - my milk delivery tends to be paid every other month by which time it’s usually dropped off the recent list).

Ability to add “Nicknames” to accounts - for example, under “Frequent” I have “Paypal” (with two linked accounts: I couldn’t tell you what the difference between them was) and “THE” (yep, that’s what Monzo is showing me).

Ability to easily “List all transactions” to/from payees.

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Hey @kavi :wave:. Thanks so much for asking the question!

Where to start?! Three overriding thoughts, I think:

  1. It’d be great to think about payments from Monzo, payments from connected accounts and pot transfers as one thing, both for one-off and scheduled payments. For me, that means one place to go that can do it all - or clear signposts about what goes where in the app. (In my head, I’ve a nice screen where you can elegantly swipe to select the account/pots the money is going from/to, reinforcing Monzo as a financial hub).

  2. Monzo is my main account and I frequently use it to receive money from a savings or investment account, then immediately transfer the same amount elsewhere. Some quality of life improvements, like being able to tap on a transaction and immediately send the same amount to a pot (or even pull the same amount from a pot for a card transaction) or to an external account would be amazing :heart:

  3. We all know this, but the payees system needs love. Create, merge, curate payees… Also, being able to flag yourself a payee might (in the future) unlock some interesting analytics (what’s the net amount credited/debited to my savings account…). One thing to flag, though - I don’t want transfers to my different accounts showing as just “Peter G” with the same avatar. I need to be able to see easily where money has gone to different savings account, my credit card, other current accounts… So either an extra line on the feed, the bank logo instead of my avatar, an automatic note (or a combination of the three).

So much more, but I’d love it to be simple and elegant, but supremely powerful. Designed for open banking and Monzo as a financial hub. Laying the groundwork for analytics (what I sent where in what period). And with some nice polish and quality of life improvements thrown in!

:monzopride: :heart:

33 Likes

I’d like to be able to merge and rename payees, even if you have the other banks correct name from them sending me money or CoP

I’d like to be able to name them how I know them, for example:
If I was sent money by A J Smith, I now have a payee called that when in actual fact I know them as Tony Smith because I don’t know there middle name to know it as a J and I’ve never known them as they’re actual name Anthony, everybody calls them Tony. There’s a few instances of this. Especially where I have multiple accounts for different people and they’re listed separately: for example: Tony Smith(Payee I made), A Smith(Payee made from a transfer from bank 1), A J Smith(Payee made from a transfer from bank 2)

TLDR Please let me merge and rename to a name I know

Edit, please offer the option to hide all your contacts! I have never used it, and probably never will, it’s incredibly annoying

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image

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You already have control over this. Tap your profile image in the top left, the cog in the top right > privacy and security then turn off payment with friends.

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Echoing what’s been said above, and assuming it’s obvious enough to be on your list already, but proper payee management.

Editing, merging, everything @Peter_G said above etc.

Also yes, ability to hide some contacts from my people with Monzo list.

Not sure if this will come within your remit, but it’s on the payments page, soooo…let us please edit scheduled payments to pots. Can’t see any reason for this to lag behind standing orders at all.

Thoughts on the scheduled section in particular:

  • Split monthly, quarterly, yearly etc payments into their own sub headings, and give me a total above each. This would be a really nice quality of life addition.

  • Following on from the above, perhaps the option to create the correct scheduled transfer into a bill pot based on these figures directly? Would be great to take into account the yearly subs and make sure the monthly contribution covered these.

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Thank you… I don’t think I recognised that before. Sadly though, I do use some of these features (split bills, etc.) with my friends. It’s just that I wish friends was not synonymous with random people in my contacts list.

I’ve turned it off now though, as I think it more important that the guy I occasionally have to phone to reboot a server at work shouldn’t see that I have a Monzo account.

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You really don’t, this turns off more than your contacts unfortunately as well as placing a rather annoying big blue box before your payees telling you to turn it back on which you can’t dismiss.

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All fair comments really, I’m just wondering now how this could be improved to still give a good user experience but also give us better privacy controls?

Alas!!

  • The ability to amend payees

  • The ability to click a transaction and pull money from a pot to cover the amount

  • The ability to move money between pots

  • Make the different sections in payees (recent, frequent, all) collapsible and expandable to tidy that screen up. Maybe even a different header for saved payees.

  • Like suggested above, the ability to click a payee and see a list of the most recent transactions to that payee

  • Again, as suggested above, the same account details for separate payees. Me and my wife both have solo credit card accounts with Halifax. A couple of times we have sent money to the wrong card because it pulls the most recent reference from a previous payment even though we selected the right payee.

  • Not sure if it would be payment related, but a feature similar to NatWest’s “Get Cash”. Possibly partnering with Tesco like Natwest have or post office, pay point etc.

:grin:

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In addition to the above suggestions, on Android, I’d like to see the Scheduled payments to display all scheduled payments (both the Scheduled payments/standing orders and Subscriptions/Direct Debits) in chronological order.

At the moment, the ‘Scheduled payments & standing order’ transactions are in chronological order. But the ‘Subscriptions & Direct Debits’ are a mess - the CPA’s are listed at the top of the transaction list in alphabetical order, then, without any break or visual marker, DD’s are then listed also in Alphabetical order.

They all need to be Chronological. This may also affect - in a good way - the display within a Bills pot, where scheduled transactions are paid from a pot. At the mo, the Bills pot is a mess of chronological and alphabetical ordering.

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Said this is another thread but Monzo should get smarter CoP all for it warning me sending money to an account i havent done so before but when ive already sent 50 odd transfers to my legacy account i dont want to continuously be warned the names dont match because of a missing middle name or using a nickname.

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I made a little idea post for this one, please vote in case it helps bump it :slight_smile:

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Directly pay payee from a pot

Oh and another one but not sure if its in this realm, when withdrawing from a pot it would be good if i could send that directly to a payee rather than having to withdraw and then send in 2 seperate actions/flows.

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For reference, there are a few ideas that it’s worth pulling out here for Kavi and co to take a look at:

With 316 votes (and third overall) is your Pot to Pot transfer idea.

With 251 votes (and fifth overall) is Improved Payee Management.

With 155 votes (and 11th overall) is Add Photo to Payee.

With 128 votes (and in 15th position) is Assign Transaction to Pot Button to Withdraw Exact Transaction Amount.

Just behind, with 127 votes and im 16th place overall is Edit Scheduled Pot Transfers.

Lots more thoughts in there if the Monzo team fancies a dive in!

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Pot to pot is probably my No1 feature request.

1 Like

Reference stickiness.

Currently, if I change the “notes” field after sending a payment, I can’t easily access that same reference next time I send a payment to that person.

Example: I send a payment to a building society account which requires the building society acc number in the reference field. After sending, I go into the payment and add “paying back XXX for lunch” in the notes field. Next time I want to send a payment to that person, I’m only given “paying back XXX for lunch” as a possible reference, not their building society acc reference.

7 Likes