NatWest, RBS, Ulster Bank (and the rest of the group) also do this every night at around 1:30am.
A longer outage during the clock change does make sense, though, for banks with older systems. Both because of the potential that the “same hour” occurring twice could cause problems on some of their more simplistic old systems and because of the need to keep everything in sync. If the clocks need to be manually changed, then they have to take everything offline to change the clocks on every system at once. Otherwise everything would be out of sync which would risk things not working properly.
Computers also usually calculate time in seconds from midnight on the 1st of January 1970 (for historical reasons) so a jump probably has to be manually programmed in on the very old mainframes - some of which run code written in COBALT and use ticker-tape emulation software to produce the “expected” output.
I’m sure there’s another thread where I’ve discussed Monzo’s approach to this, and complained about it in the past, because it messes me up at times. But this is the only one I can find, so I’ll post this here.
That’s just happened again. Monzo live in GMT year round. So midnight doesn’t occur for Monzo during BST until it’s 1am for us humans, as I’ve been rudely reminded of thanks to being charged overdraft interest.
One of my incomes went in today. At 00:17 this morning just before winding down for bed, I decided to pre-empt sorting my income and moved money to where it needed to be. It would drop into my account today anyway (which it did). This sorting naturally took me into my overdraft, which my income took me out of when it went in, which is in line with the overdraft terms to avoid being charged interest (my account is in credit and it’s not midnight yet). I thought I was being savvy.
The issue here is Monzo have now charged me for being overdrawn for 1 day. And sure enough, on my statements, the transfers to Chase and my pots show as 10/04/2022, despite showing as Today, 11 April in my feed. It’s 12p, but has left me quite grumpy out of principle.
Fix your clock Monzo, it’s placed you in violation of your own overdraft agreement!
Raise a complaint with Monzo specifically about this being caused by clock-change issues and they should refund the interest and alter what they report to CRAs to show that you haven’t actually used your overdraft.
Hopefully it will also prompt them to consider actually moving their clocks in the future to match real U.K. time year-round instead of “fixing” them at GMT.
After 6 hours I’ve had a reply. Just the cookie cutter scripted we’re escalating this to the right team response. Can front line agents really not deal with anything at all?
I’ve been told to expect a call, email (way to train me to fall for phishing scams), or a reply via the chat (it should only really be this) from Monzo within 4 business days. So onerous.
To defend Monzo here (and as you know I’m not an apologist for any one bank and am willing to call things out when necessary) it’s pretty standard for complaints to be handled by a different department - or, in Monzo parlance, a “specialist team”.
This is because the complaints department is always made up of senior staff and investigators with authority to look across the organisation to gather evidence and render a judgement designed to result in a fair outcome for the customer. Being slightly removed from day to day operations also helps them to do this more impartially.
So it’s not exactly surprising that complaints require a response from a separate team, although I agree that they should get back to you via Chat and not other channels (unless you specifically request a different channel yourself).
I can’t help but feel that if this were any other bank, the front line agent would have acknowledged my query, look into it, perhaps even attempted to address it, and remediate it there and then (cancel the charge) before they they escalate the issue and log the complaint.
Yeah, I see what you’re saying and ideally they would - however doing that would be a great personal risk for them if the complaint outcome later sided against the customer for whatever reason, so most advisors wouldn’t do it even if they were allowed to for fear of being reprimanded.
The time is hard-coded to GMT so there doesn’t have to be any adjustment for clock changes (not even one minute of downtime) as there is at other banks.
Other banks generally take all their systems offline just before the clocks are due to change, then keep them offline while the change is made manually, before bringing them back up once it’s done. They also keep them offline for longer than would strictly be necessary for just making the change to ensure that no time occurs twice (in the Autumn, when you have two 1am hours) which would probably mess up some of their older systems.
This should be a problem that can be resolved without Monzo’s current policy of just ignoring time changes, I would like to see the process reviewed.
Monzo services all use UTC (for all intents and purposes GMT). I don’t think it’s “hard coded”: it’s just the reference time as there has to be one source of the truth.
If I’m reading right, you seem to be saying that Monzo forces this time zone to avoid taking the bank offline to avoid winding it back or forward. That seems to me to be a bit anachronistic - I’m sure that Monzo could change the user facing time (different to the server time) if they chose to. I really don’t think you can draw a parallel between Monzo’s microservices architecture and the mainframes of the high street banks here.
Indeed, I very much hope that Monzo USA works on a US time zone. Perhaps someone can confirm?
If it does (and actually even if it doesn’t) it just suggests to me that Monzo has cut corners and not actually finished things properly (again)…
So do I, that isn’t intended to be mistaken for usable code Was just trying to illustrate the general concept - apply charge at 1am when that’s 12 midnight for UK customer - without going in to the full detail of carefully setting dates and accounting for exceptions.
That’s the messy bit though . If anyone made a change to fix the overall time in the system it would bug that line of code out, plus hard coding specific dates . As I say hopefully the standards are a touch higher than adding specific rules like this into individual features.
Interesting but it’s a flawed poll in my mind. To me, that poll looks more like stopping daylight savings would mean staying in GMT permanently. I feel that would be even worse than what we do at the moment.
Was just trying to illustrate the general concept - apply charge at 1am when that’s 12 midnight for UK customer - without going in to the full detail of carefully setting dates and accounting for exceptions.
. If anyone made a change to fix the overall time in the system it would bug that line of code out, plus hard coding specific dates 
. As I say hopefully the standards are a touch higher than adding specific rules like this into individual features.