Had an interesting experience trying to use Monzo.me which, I think, highlights some easy room for improvement. Essentially I tried to use monzo.me to split the bill between my friends and it didn’t go down so well.
Without really explaining what Monzo was beforehand, I went through the app and sent the monzo.me link out to my friends the next day (love how easy it is to do). I have one very security conscious friend who has never heard much about Monzo and he was very hesitant about putting his card details into the page - something along the lines about it seeming dodgy, which wasn’t made much better when he (for whatever reason) put monzo.me into who.is. His exact words were “if it was paypal then I would have been game”. This then made the rest of my friends wary, so we ended up just reverting to our usual way of sending money.
In light of this, I think that it would be great to more prominently include some more information about how secure using Monzo.me is - especially when people are at the point where they are putting their card details in. Even just stating that the payment goes through Stripe would help.
I can understand how the unfamiliar might be unsure of using monzo.me - if anything, the fact that it’s so damn easy probably made my friend a little wary. Would be interested in knowing if others have had similar experiences, or are my friends just more cautious than the norm?
The next update to the app should help because it’ll include the option to set profile pictures which will be displayed in the Monzo.me page. So that should make the site look less like what you might imagine a phishing page looking like!
The me page also isn’t very clear when it comes to the fact it’s limited to debit cards only - the error given is pretty ambiguous and often I’ve found others that haven’t got a account ending up just paying me via Paym anyway…
I’ve had people wary of using monzo.me too. In fact I’ve literally only used it to test it works, nobody without a Monzo card trusts it and everyone with doesn’t need it.
I generally end up with people insisting on giving me half a tree instead.
I introduced our sandwich lady to Monzo and people use her Monzo.me link to pay for sandwiches when they forgot to take cash.
I sent fairly clear email around, mentioning 2 key factors:
card details are NOT stored
page is secure (padlock)
And that was enough, I didn’t hear about anyone particularly concerned. It probably helped that word got around quickly, because payments are instant. Few happy people mentioning that ‘wow, payment was instant and I did it while in the queue to pay’ did a good PR job.
Hey Isaac, thanks for the feedback! You raise some very interesting points. I think often living in our Monzo bubble we sometimes assume that the service we provide infers legitimacy to some extent, although many people aren’t yet familiar enough with Monzo to feel confident sending one off payments using Monzo.me.
A few people raised similar thoughts in our most recent user testing session, and we want to work on some ways that we can include brief and reassuring summary of what Monzo.me is as part of the autofill message when you share a Monzo.me link, to give people some more confidence and build some trust
While we’re on the subject, I noticed the message that’s displayed when a link is oneboxed might be a little bit off putting for some people -
This is an image
as users, we know that the person sending the payment has to fill in their card details before the payment is made. But that message makes it sound like the payment will be made just by clicking the link. So perhaps people will think that the sender has prepopulated their payment details or done something else to enable the payment to be taken instantly.
Perhaps the message could be something like “pay Alex instantly from this site”…or maybe it’s just me
Definitely! I think we will revisit both the phrasing used and the the information included in this message. Again, I think it’s the case that having worked on Monzo.me for months there are areas of assumed knowledge in the transfer/payment process which we need to make clearer.
Thanks, Naji! Absolutely agree with the points your raise and great to know it’s something that you’re already thinking about working on - so easy to forget about the assumed knowledge and comfort that most of us now have with everything Monzo.
Look forward to seeing what comes out of the comms. work
me page also isn’t very clear when it comes to the fact it’s limited to debit cards only - the error given is pretty ambiguous and often I’ve found others that haven’t got a 
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