Travel firms (like Thomsons) add a % fee if a credit card is used to pay for holidays, goods or services - if a Monzo card is presented for such payments is it treated as a credit card or debit card ?
My understanding (which comes from working at a payment solutions provider), is that travel companies that apply a surcharge for payments from credit cards, identify those cards based on the BIN (the first 6 digits of your card number).
Since the Monzo cards have a debit BIN (you can check it here) -
I wouldn’t expect you to be charged for using your Monzo card.
Having said that, we’ve seen issues with companies not recognising Monzo BINs as debit in the past so I’d recommend double checking this with the support team via the in-app chat.
If you do, please do let us know what they say 
Also, be careful on the single card payment limit, which I believe this is ÂŁ2k.
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These guides explain how users can check their limits -
Interesting enough the only fintech that comes up as a credit card is Loot for some reason.
The reason at the moment is that the BIN range is a prepaid range from Mastercard.
There is one big issue with MasterCard, they are quickly running out of BIN / PAN ranges, so are reusing old ranges and Starling are running into this as their range was a prepaid BIN Range, which MasterCard have converted to a Debit Card Range…
Will be interesting to see if Monzo are in the 5xxx range or the new 2xxxx range of cards.
With the rapid expansion of the Chinese population and their growing use of cards one Chinese economist recently predicted that they would have issues over the availability of BIN prefixes and that the whole global system would need revamping perhaps by prefixing BIN with an additional digit.
Thanks all - now I can present it for payment as a debit card with some authoritative backing.
However, I suspect I may have to “encourage” certain merchants that this is the case.
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I checked with Thomsons - was eventually advised that Monzo card would be treated as a debit card.
Took several days to get an answer - the enquiry was booted up the chain of command to one of their senior beancounter types for a response.
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