Introducing Monzo Flex – a better way to pay later 🚀


Alt text: screenshot of the help section of the Monzo app with a message that reads “Hello! The categories on my Flex repayments seem to have been changed in bulk overnight, which means that Trends isn’t accurate. There have been other reports of this on the Community Forum. Is this a known issue? Is there a time to fix?”

Sadness.

(Cc @TheoGibson for visibility)

Changed in bulk to what, I thought you’d survived the changes or has something else altered last night.

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I didn’t actually check yesterday.

What I do is recategorise the money coming back from Flex as a Transfer, then when I pay the bill I change that to a Flex/Credit card payment category that gets excluded from spending Trends. That way I get to use Trends for monthly spend, but can still track how much I’m putting on credit every month.

What’s happened is that all the (many) Flex transactions that were categorised as Flex/Credit Card Payments have been moved to Transfers. That’s gonna be painful to fix…

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Oh… :sob:

Morning folks. I’m looking in to this - I’ll get back to you later today with an update. Thanks for flagging.

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I have an update :eyes:

You’ve hopefully seen the latest updates to Trends, with the launch of Targets earlier this month (context if you haven’t).

We had lots of feedback from early testers that Flex wasn’t interacting with Targets well, and it was actually making budgeting harder than before. So we recategorised Flex repayments to transfers so that Trends works as intended.

We’re now working towards making Flex its own account in Trends. This will give you all the visibility you previously had including categorisation, and full control over whether you want Flex included in targets or not.I don’t have a date for when Flex will be in Trends just yet. But we’re working on it.

You can go back and recategorise your Flex repayments if you want - but I appreciate that’s going to be a fair bit of admin. If you can, I’d suggest leaving it as it is until we launch Flex Account in Trends.

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Thanks for the update, Tom.

If I could give some gentle feedback, this feels like a bold move to make without any customer communication.

As I mentioned in my post, I’ve spent a lot of time curating and recategorising transactions so that Flex transactions work the right way for me in Trends. All that effort is now seemingly wasted.

I like the direction of travel (in fact, I’m very supportive of making Flex its own thing) and appreciate that this was done with the best of intentions, but for those of us who rely on accuracy of our data, surprise after-the-event changes like this are really not welcome, I’m afraid.

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Would this work then allow Flex to be visible in open banking platforms? When I go into Revolut to add monzo, Flex will show but with no balance and nothing happens when I request to connect.

I don’t want to get too ranty here as I do appreciate you coming to explain, but this is terrible. Truly terrible.

There’s history of Monzo putting things on top of other things that don’t interact well with each other and this is yet another one.

“Go back and change them” how about don’t change them in the first place?

They are not transfers, why you think that’s the right category for them I have no idea and you’ve done this as a half measure as the next bit isn’t ready.

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100% agree with this.

This is a dreadful decision by Monzo & goes against the original intention of things being automatically apportioned an equal split on repayments.

This now renders flex absolutely worthless in a budgeting perspective.

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Yep, agree with others that this is a very odd decision.

For me, this is what I’m left with…

Say there was an original transaction in November of £100, categorised as ‘shopping’. I then Flexed it, and the £100 returned to my account from Flex is still categorised as ‘shopping’ (the returns from Flex haven’t been re-categorised for me). The subsequent extra payments I’ve made to clear the balance are now categorised as transfers. The net result is that I’ve spent nothing according to Trends.

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All this change serves to show, is that, Monzo own that data and they’ll do whatever the like with it. So customers need to be wary that all that hard work of categories can just be binned off in an instant overnight

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The moral of this story is never put any effort into anything, ever.

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Basically entirely agree with @Peter_G and @Revels above.

And this sentence in particular… as politely as possible, I moved to Trends last January(?) and lost all budgeting on the promise of further updates, and only just today have got even a portion of what I used to have back, so I really don’t have a lot of love for this approach!

And on the general point… am I understanding correctly that now a £30 Flex purchase on day 1 will show in Trends as £30 that day, and no other outgoing from then on, just transfers back and forth between Trends and current account?

Because if so… that seems odd to me and is not how I would want it to work. I can see the other side of course, but Flex isn’t a credit card with one later repayment date (when I lose the money), it is a payment over multiple months, and so I would much rather see myself losing £10 per month as that is how I have budgeted. If I wanted to spend (and therefore track in my budget) the full £30 on day 1, I wouldn’t use Flex.

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Totally agree. I don’t use Flex personally, but I feel like when anything like this happens there should at least be a heads-up in app, if not a way to opt-out for the time being. To hear about it in a post on a forum that most Monzo customers aren’t a part of seems a bit off.

I have the same question. I’ve just used one of the six month flex offers for a purchase of £600. For me, this spending should be accounted for at £100 a month in the category of the original purchase, and this is how I’ve used Flex since last October. But now the intended behaviour seems to be recognising the entire purchase in one month. I’m not sure how that improves Trends or targets for me? (Though appreciate this method works for others).

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Am I right in thinking that transactions made using the virtual Flex card used to appear in Trends, but now they don’t?

Just playing around trying to get my data back to where it was and anything paid using the virtual card doesn’t seem to appear anywhere now :thinking:

Unless I’m misunderstanding the issue, I think you’re not seeing them because they have been recategorised as ‘Transfers’ as per post#3080 above :point_up: :

Yes I’m possibly confusing myself.

But I made a purchase in November on the Flex virtual card categorised as entertainment. That doesn’t appear in Trends under entertainment or transfers. I’ve made the first Flex payment today and it’s now categorised as a transfer. Just trying to figure out how and where the entertainment spending is recognised.

I’ve made a custom category now called Flex and I’ll do it myself.

I can’t remember/not going back to fix them all, so now Monzo has made it worse, I’ll fix it the best I can.

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