How would Monzo's UI react to having a balance of millions in an account? Just curious

There were some screenshots floating about of Monzo Dev’s test accounts that had massive balances. Although I think that was the old UI.

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Other than perhaps running out of space, in terms of lots of zeros on a screen, I can’t imagine it would look any different. I have a relatively small screen so a figure like £1235.57 sometimes looks like £123…

a lot better :slight_smile:

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Fingers crossed, my oil play pays off! :wink:

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Our staging environment (so, not real money) lets us add arbitrary balances to an account, so we’re able to have pretty high balances and test that. Your transaction view might truncate the description, but amounts are fine.

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Interesting question.

One extraordinary refund later and Nora McSimplefish is a multi-millionaire.

Another even more extraordinary refund later and she’s a billionaire!

If your thinking of moving your billions to Monzo, could I suggest you find a different bank?

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This still isn’t fixed at just 6 figures…

That’s on food I see :open_mouth:

Wonder what it was that cost over a billion in the first place :exploding_head:

Dried pasta and toilet rolls, probably.

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Next question:

With the £10,000 daily bank transfer limit, £10,000 Monzo to Monzo limit, £400 ATM withdrawal limit, and £10,000 daily card transaction limit, how long would it take to spend all that money?

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Some quick maths says 90 years :scream:.

Please don’t send us your billions, it would be such a headache to deal with.

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So it’s only billions that cause a problem? A singular billion is fine? What about Bullions? Can I send you them?

On a serious note, are there technical issues you’d see as a problem, or is it more a regulatory problem of a bank handling that amount of money on behalf of one person?

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So I can send somebody else’s billions?

Good to know

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If you had billions and loved Monzo that much I’m sure you could work with them to accommodate it :wink:

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Another interesting question. I can only talk about the bits I know about (I’m sure there are many other issues that would crop up that I can’t think of).

From a purely technical perspective, we wouldn’t have any issues with billions. Your money is just a number in a database, and our database can handle some very big numbers.

Getting your money out again at any reasonable speed (£100ks to millions a day) would be a pain. The FPS network has a £250k per transaction limit, and then there’s the “Net Sender Cap”. I won’t do into details, but basically there’s a limit to the total amount money Monzo can send via FPS in one day. This isn’t an issue 99.99999% of the time (even when dealing with million pound transfers), but would prove a real issue if you wanted to take your billions out.

We could send that amount of money using something like CHAPs, but even that isn’t super simple. We would need to work with another bank (Natwest) to make that happen. Again moving large sums (millions) is fine, but billions is a bit mad.

Then there’s the issue that if you had billions with Monzo, it would probably be more money than all of our other customer deposits put together. Which creates all kinds of conflict-of-interest problems. I don’t think the PRA would be happy that a single customer could potential cause serious capital or liquidity problems for retail bank on a whim (this is why most bank account have a limit on how much you can deposit).

We probably wouldn’t. Taking on such a customer would probably require us to give up normal retail banking, and we didn’t build Monzo just to serve the ultra rich.

Ultimately this all boils down to scale, the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire, is about a billion. It just such an insanely large number that lots of things just break.

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I don’t believe you. Send me £1billlion so that I can prove you wrong :smirk:

I know there are banks that can accommodate massive amounts, do they require a different licence and different infrastructure so that they’re not restricted by those “small” limits?

Basically, how would you open a bank to service the mega rich? Asking for a friend.

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@thomas thank you for sticking with this thread - I’m finding it really interesting, and it’s not even my thread or the original topic!

Does this essentially mean that you end up with different tiers of bank? Those that cater for people with a ‘sane’ amount of money that isn’t abnormally large in comparison to other customers, and another tier for the insanely rich (millions+) who also all store the same quantities of money, keeping everyone within the same kind of ballpark figure as one another to avoid any one person having a majority of the deposits? This would mean that people have to be promoted & relegated between them as their portion of the pie becomes too big or too small.

Is this why single banks have ‘premier’ tiers for folk with crazy incomes? Are they handled differently/with a different license, or is that just a way of ensuring they (the bank) manage your money in a way that benefits them (the bank)?

Do millionaires/billionaires then all have to bank together, meaning they’re only a small percentage of total deposits or do they all just have to share that love around and give everyone a smaller slice of their insanely big pie?

Now, I’m aware that anyone with billions is unlikely to have it sat in an account gathering dust, but at some point it’s got to transit through banks, surely? I.e. someone selling their billion-dollar/pound company needs to put that money somewhere until it’s reinvested. Or maybe that doesn’t happen and I’m completely wrong in thinking they ever leave it laying around!

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Dude, he can only send you 1000 x £1million transactions… much quicker if he sends me 500 of them, and then I can pass it on to you :wink: You’ll get your money in half the time - it’s a no brainer!

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I’m glad I read down this far to see your reply. I was about to send a request to Uncle Abramovich.

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I believe if you win a multi million pound win on the Lottery, Camelot will set you up with an account at a ‘private bank’ and deposit the cash there instead of in your high street/digital current account. Those banks are set up to handle those sums, including any wealth management you would need, and you’ll probably have a named individual who would deal with your account. You would keep the current account for regular everyday payments, but the money would live in the Private Bank account