Credit and debit same day - how are low balances handled?

(I did search for a thread before I posted that new topic - didn’t find this!)

Stupid thing is - I actually had money in my account last night but before I went to bed I thought, ‘Oh, payday tomorrow…’ Then transferred my remaining balance to pay off a credit card, leaving my balance at £0.00 (for a few hours until I got paid).

Beta, testing, I understand. I do think this should be a priority to fix though. As you do expect the basic functions to work the same as legacy accounts.

Some of my direct debits I can’t change the date on or only have limited options (1st or 15th for example) so changing for a day later is not really a fix.

These days I’m comfortably off and it’s just an annoyance - but when I was younger and lived more payday to payday that could have really screwed things up for me.

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What I think would be most useful here, and similar to Lloyds (the only other bank which I have recent experience of), would be to:

  1. Run direct debits in the early morning, and those that succeed, fine.
  2. Any that fail due to insufficient funds are ‘suspended’
  3. A notification comes through to the user saying 'hey, look, there’s a DD here that’s about to decline, put some money in your account before (say) 3pm.
  4. The ‘suspended’ direct debits are then retried in the afternoon. Any that now succeed, fine. Any that fail are declined permanently.

Especially given that ‘pots’ are on their way, this would give the user ample time to fix the problem by transferring money in, or emptying a pot, before having to go through the pain of getting the requesting organisation to retry.

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Agreed. What I thought I’d written was that “it was a functional workaround” but thodse words obviously never made it out of my head.

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I have one direct debit where I can’t choose the date at all, it has to be the 1st. Luckily it’s not a big one, and I always make sure there’s money in the account the day before (even with my legacy banks, I don’t trust same day in/out to go smoothly!). But it seems to me this issue needs to be fixed before Monzo get 400,000 people on the current account, because there are some who won’t be able to shift the direct debit date, and could incur financial costs due to this behaviour. Not to mention the (unnecessary?) support load this issue could cause.

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Hi Tristan :wave:t3:, just wondering if there are any timescales on these adjustments and if so what they will be?
No worries if no progress yet

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@Jackcrwhitney

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Any reason Monzo processing Standing Orders on bank holidays? Rent came out today but a bill share payment from my girlfriend who’s with lloyds didn’t come through yesterday (set up for 1st) as expected nor today, as I half expected.

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Interesting. I can see how this has caused you a problem but my instinct is that it’s “better” for payments to come out on the date they’re meant to be sent, rather than giving the computers a pointless rest on weekends and bank holidays.

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We process standing orders as normal :slight_smile: I’m aware Lloyd’s Banking Group aren’t doing certain things this weekend (notably stuff won’t show up on your statement until Tuesday) but couldn’t say whether that includes SOs.

Processing standing orders on holidays is not normal, though. None of my banks do so, and its really disappointing that Monzo still don’t get this right!

I’m interested in why we shouldn’t process them on bank holidays? There is no technical reason (as they are just Faster Payments) not to :slight_smile:

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Barclays aren’t processing until tomorrow either which is annoying as I have the money there for them to take. I’d prefer on their due date, less chance I get confused and spend the cash
And all my transactions since Friday are in pending showing they under tomorrow’s date

Whilst I see your point, and I certainly don’t see why UK banks don’t process standing orders and direct debits on weekend bank holidays, the problem is that the vast majority of UK banks do this.

That means that the general UK public had a certain expectation. It also means that there is a real risk that eg rent payments are paid out before salary comes in, which can have serious consequences.

As such, if Monzo insist on handling direct debits and standing orders so materially different from all other banks, then they really should publicise that very much!

As it stands this is the main reason why I cannot consider using Monzo for anything else than petty cash,and why I cannot recommend Monzo to anyone, because the risks for anyone who’d use Monzo without reading through hundreds of responses in this thread first, are far too great!

@HughWells, this also answers your question.

Doesn’t everyone get paid early before the bank holiday? Even the social sent my dole money last Thursday instead of tomorrow

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on the last working day of the month I would think ??? not just bank holidays, otherwise the payment would be late ?

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You are right, of course. That part of my argument doesn’t hold up!

I still stand by the rest of it, though, that if Monzo want to be different from every other bank in this, then they should really publicise this a lot more!

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I suppose a note on the feed a few days before could do the trick?

And/Or a note on the standing order setup screen.

or perhaps a note to your legacy bank that any charges incurred for late payment of SO because of their inability to process SO on the date required, or the nearest working day before the date, will be passed on to them :slight_smile: at the end of the day you set up a standing order to use that money on that date, not after it, as any payment might fail if the funds aren’t there :slight_smile:

Their reply would be to read their t&c’s

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