This feels like a confected argument. This is a conversation, not a formal piece of correspondence. Indeed, Dan even followed up and explained what he meant.
I agree there’s a time to challenge sloppy wording - or companies trying to hide behind vagaries. But this isn’t it.
For the folk wondering why we have less staff engagement than we used to, this might give you one insight as to why.
All too often maybe, but in a comment on why Monzo don’t offer to make any changes over the phone, whether or not those words are used as a cop-out elsewhere is irrelevant, because that is not the context those words are being read in here.
Is it definitively known that it is up to Starling? See previous conversations about Apple pay; Apple have egregious NDAs that industry only puts up with because Apple is an 800lb gorilla, so even if Starling did know why Apple pay won’t work with that card, or if there is a reason Apple have prohibited that user from using that card on Apple pay, they probably can’t tell you. Or, they genuinely don’t know, because Apple won’t tell them. Or there’s a bug, and they don’t know what the cause is. But nobody who works in customer facing roles (or businesses) wants to tell angry customers “we can’t tell you why”.
I don’t know why you have decided there is some secret undisclosed reason for making this decision. They have disclosed it: it is a security / fraud control not to offer anything relating to account manipulation over the phone. The limited “out of app” account modification that they do offer (“Help, I can’t access my email so can’t sign in”), has to be done in writing.
That they are app-first means that yes it should be expected for everyone that specific day-to-day telephone banking services are not available.
But you can’t say that “security reasons” is some sort of cop-out when that is the basis of Monzo’s decision not to offer any out-of-app functions over the phone.
They genuinely can’t tell you why. It’s part of Apple’s financial crime rules - we have to abide by the same processes. In lots of cases we can only tell a customer that they’re unable to add their card to Apple Pay (similar things exist for Google Pay too) except in Google’s case they won’t allow person A to use MDES tokens, then tell person A the problem is on the bank’s side when it’s very clearly not.
It’s daft, but the rules put into place to protect against fraud, money laundering and other types of financial crime are closely guarded. So we don’t know the reason a customer is unable to activate an MDES token other than the error code we’re provided by either Apple or Google and they’re about as generic as can be.
Individually everything you say here makes sense. But there’s a large part of me that worries about the system as a whole. Does anyone understand how these various things interact? How do we avoid Kafkaesque situations?
(Not after an answer, more for general musing).
You’ve hit the nail on the head!
It’s really frustrating to tell somebody we don’t know why, but often we don’t.
As another example a customer gets in touch because their card has declined in the shop. It’s a logical expectation that you can contact your bank and they’ll be able to tell you. Sometimes we can, but in the following what would we tell somebody:
I guess you have to put your faith in the regulators to do their job to keep everybody in check…
I am sure there have been instances where financial institutions have lost cases sent to the ombudsman because of regulations that obligated the financial institution to essentially treat the customer the way they were treated (but which were ultimately ‘unfair’ as experienced by the customer particularly where subsequently to have been found to not in fact be a money launderer).
It’s a bit of a mess, and I would argue does little to enhance the effect of fincrime regulations as criminals will know that when their account mysteriously stops working for no apparent reason and nobody at the bank can tell them why that the jig is probably up and it’s time to move on. The artificial shroud of secrecy banks are obligated to maintain really helps nothing, but the issue is that without some sort of police / regulator / bank SLA on how quickly these matters should be initially investigated and cleared up you would still end up with an infuriating black box where the customer can be told nothing useful about when they might get their account back (or not).
I don’t think is quite true but again it’s hard to discuss without going into too much detail.
Let’s create a fictional scenario though 
Joe Bloggs is a very bad, criminally minded, person. Joe’s been a Banko customer for a year and has been successfully laundering drug money through his account for the past nine months.
Joe’s pretty confident that he’s managed to evade Banko’s financial crime rules, so his activity has been pretty consistent for the last nine months with nothing out of the ordinary.
Suddenly, one Thursday morning Joe’s wakes up and gets a letter from the customer services team at Banko. The letter states they’re closing his account and will return any monies owed as soon as possible. It also tells him that they have no further information to give.
Joe’s a bit confused - he’s not done anything different with his account for the past nine months. Nothing has changed, so although Joe knows he’s been caught for laundering funds he doesn’t know exactly what triggered the closure of the account.
He tells his gang what’s happened, but can’t offer them any advice as to what to avoid doing on their account because he doesn’t know.
All these are possibilities:
enforcement(Also I’m sorry that sounds patronising - it isn’t the intention but it’s the easiest way to try explain some of the context with giving anything anyway).
Fascinating. Is this where the term ‘grass’ (whistle blower, tell tale) originates?
Darn autocorrect, I hope I haven’t sown the seed of doubt about my authenticity…
Sprinkle your posts with just enough to make it look authentic.
No doubt somebody will eventually tell me to ‘sod off’.
Try explaining how a fence is involved in getting rid of the gear.
I’d like to join in but I wouldn’t want to look like a clod.
I was thinking more about the ‘other end of the scale’ - if the account is promptly closed and the customer told to sod off ( 
) then that’s one thing, I’m talking about when customers get stuck in a never-ending Kafkaesque state of regular customer services shrugging their shoulders and saying things like “sorry, your account does not appear to exist, are you sure you bank with WorldsLocal Bank” with no access to their funds for weeks while police/banks are “investigating” that is a bit of a nonsense (I don’t know if perhaps this happens less often these days)
You can’t have more than one ‘card reader’ with HSBC and FirstDirect that way, as they lock you to the phone/app combination you set up the Digital Secure Key on, and if you want to set it up on a new phone you have to disable it on the old phone first.
Which means you’re screwed if you’ve changed phones because the old phone kinda blew up after getting rained on, so you can’t deactivate the DSK on it. Only solution is to spend at least half an hour on the phone getting the bank to deactivate it at their end.
Although this can be annoying, it also works as a security feature. If I’m registered for Digital Secure Key on my phone, I know both that nobody else can attempt to register it and that I am the only one who can possibly generate codes for my account.
This helps reduce the possibility of fraud, as only allowing one device to be registered means you can never become an “unaware” victim of impersonation or fraud.