Declined account because of passport

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1

Hi,

So I decided to register an account to use as a non-bills account to keep track of what I was spending elsewheres a bit easier. Unfortunately after taking a photo of my passport and doing the cringeworthy ‘selfie video’ for the verification, I got declined because my passport is a month out of date.

I don’t have any other photo ID and I wasn’t planning on renewing my British passport given all the nonsense going on right now (as I’m Northern Irish I’m entitled to an Irish passport as well and I plan on replacing my British one with that before March). Considering I haven’t stopped being me in the past month and I can still travel outside of the UK using my expired passport for another 5 months and within for a further 13, I don’t really understand why this would fail on the identity verification step for a bank account - particularly as I wouldn’t even need a photo ID to open an account with anyone else.

Is there any way to have the identity verification step manually reviewed with a bit of human common sense? Will using my new Irish passport in a few months time cause a further common sense gap and see it declined too?

I’m hardly desperate for the account, so I’m not going to change my plans and start throwing money around to get the ID sorted out sooner, but it’s such a silly thing so if there’s any steps to carry on regardless I’d appreciate being pointed in the right direction.

Cheers.

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I believe it’s a legal requirement and not a Monzo one for a valid passport to open the account. Other banks have branches to confirm who you are. Mine has also expired since I opened my account and I can still fly to the mainland but it’s different rules for different sectors unfortunately. The Irish passport will work fine.

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Hi @CDesigns - love the 11th Doctor avatar first of all!

Unfortunately as @Rat_au_van mentioned, as we don’t have branches to verify people face to face, it is a legal requirement for us to need valid government issued photo ID upon sign-up along with the selfie video. This is generally either a passport or a driving license for the most part (the driving license can be provisional also).

We are working on ways to be more flexible and to allow a wider range of documents in the future but I’m afraid at the moment we don’t have a manual fallback method.

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