We are moving house within the next 2 months and are “full monzo”. We will need to make a number of CHAPS payments from our Monzo Joint account to our solicitor.
It is not currently possible to schedule a CHAPS payment from inside the app (and the amounts will be over the daily limit). I have asked the in-app chat support but there seems to be some confusing and conflicting answers between the different support team members that have responded! This is making me nervous that there could be issues on completion day.
I need assurance that we are able to schedule CHAPS payments in a timely manner that exceed our daily limit for very specific dates. (e.g. on exchange and on our completion date).
How much notice do I need to give the Monzo support team to organise this? This was very straightforward with our old “traditional” bank but seems to be much harder with Monzo!
Can you open an account with another bank - it’s always worth having another account for a number of reasons I won’t go into here but you have the time to do so and it could prove useful again.
Then once open, use that account a few times and use it for CHAPS - will seem like a sledgehammer etc but the best way going forward in my view.
We are full Monzo and used our Monzo account to buy our house. There were no issues, but we were chain-free and so I think it was perhaps less nerve-wracking in terms of timing. Unfortunately I can’t help you with the process as my husband handled it, but my understanding was that it was a straightforward message through the in-app chat to temporarily raise our payment limits. I just wanted to put your mind at rest that other people who are full monzo have successfully completed a house sale with no complications.
However, I second what Sahajesh has said - whatever your situation it is prudent to have two bank accounts (whether with two high street banks, two digital banks, or one of each). The ideal would be to have one with a MasterCard debit card and one with a visa debit card, just in case either suffer an outage.
However, from our own experience I know that another bank account may not be the solution to this problem as your solicitors may not be happy funnelling money through a brand new account with no transaction history due to money laundering regulations.
I purchased a house in the U.K. earlier this year whilst living in the US. I wasn’t able to set up a CHAPS payment without going into branch, which obviously wasn’t an option for me…
I simply messaged the solicitor and they were very happy with me sending it as just a normal bank transfer about a week before completion.
Monzo obviously have limits, you would have to reach out them to temporarily raise them. I wouldn’t be concerned whatsoever.
Send an in-app chat message to ask this question. I have had to change my daily limits for a few payments on occasion and they have been very helpful.
I believe they can also complete a CHAPS payment but I have not had to try that, but if you ask in advance I am sure they will do all they can to help.
We asked our solicitor if they’d accept normal bank payment and they said yes. Asked monzo to urgently raise limits and sent the full amount in one hit. All seemed okay
It’s really worth avoiding CHAPS for this altogether. I don’t know what Monzo’s FP limit is but with a citi and metrobank account each you can send £1m fee-free and instantly with FP and not have to worry about CHAPS scheduling, limits or CHAPS fees. Even Santander give you £100k with no CHAPS fee which is 10x what Monzo will do.
This is one of the most important and biggest purchases in your life. Trust it to a high street bank and don’t pay unnecessarily for CHAPS.
There’s a whole thread about the issue, which led to a process being created to temporarily increase limits for online payments, but I’m not sure whether a similar process applies to CHAPS payments.
I was able to successfully test that process in September 2018. However, I’d urge you to contact them by phone, as others have suggested. I very much hope and expect that they will meet your expectations, but it feels to me like you need to have this reassurance in advance.
Do please confirm back to the forum once you’ve completed your transaction, and let us know how it went.
I paid my house deposit via a standard Faster Payment. I didn’t bother to even try to CHAPS it. I just triple checked the sort code and account number etc., direct with the solicitors and away I went.
I read an article recently (probably linked from here somewhere) pointing out that the Faster Payments limit is sufficiently high that CHAPS really should be much more of an exceptional situation than it is in reality.
Obviously it was blaming the banks for artificially lowering FP limits to get customers to use a chargeable method to transfer the money instead.
Thank you for all the responses. I’m going to find out from my solicitor if they will accept Faster Payment transfers and then ask Monzo to raise my limit.
I don’t think I really have time to setup a new bank account for the transfer - I think there will be them issues with being flagged for money laundering.
I’ll update this post as things progress incase it is useful to any others.
I used Monzo to pay my deposit/solicitor just yesterday via bank transfer - I messaged the ops team on the in-app chat in the morning and they asked me to send a selfie holding a form of ID, amount I’d be transferring and how I would be paying… they raised the limit immediately and I had no issues (I’ve done this twice now - for exchange and completion)
All the discussions here have always been about elevated Faster Payments limits which seem to have been successful so far. From memory, the maximum FP is a hugely high number that copes with most situations.