Introducing Monzo Flex – a better way to pay later 🚀

I think you must have. You don’t make any repayment decisions until you get your monthly statement. There is then a “payment window” for a few days where you can decide whether you want to pay the balance in full, or over 3, 6, 9 or 12 months. If you don’t do anything, the balance will be put on the 12-month plan. You can also add extra if you want to pay things off more quickly.

If the statement balance is less than £30, it’s taken in full.

I thought 5mil was surpassed? :upside_down_face:

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Maybe only 5 million actually trust Monzo!?

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So I had a reply this afternoon!

Feels… familiar…

Hello :wave: [name] from the lending team here. We’re really sorry that it’s taken so long to get back to you! We’re dealing with an unprecedented demand for support in our department right now.

I’ve had a look into this and I’m sorry if this has caused any inconvenience - let me explain what’s happened.

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 it’s 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.

I hope this clears things up but if not please feel free to reach out with any questions :+1:

So they’ve actually engaged with the issue, but feels rather generic. I can forgive that. That’s said, a few days to get that response? Feels a bit too little, too late.

(I’m resisting a quip about them being less busy if they didn’t make breaking changes that weren’t communicated, but we are where we are).

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Yeah I still can’t for the life of me understand how this was decided on… Complete removal of functionality without any warning and with no date for reinstatement! :upside_down_face:

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:wave: Morning everyone, we’ve been following the conversation closely and understand the frustration that we’ve recategorised Flex payments without letting you know in advance, we’re sorry about that. Following on from @TomMillslast post, I wanted to acknowledge the feedback on targets and apologise on behalf of everyone working at Monzo.

We recategorised Flex payments in response to feedback on targets

Flex payments were previously included as spending in Trends but after testing targets, it was clear that Flex wasn’t working as people expected. Targets was showing each monthly Flex payment as discretionary spend, for example 3 x £20 monthly payments against Shopping.

Flex users told us they saw payments as committed spend, like a loan repayment

But Flex payments were being included in targets as discretionary spend. So people couldn’t rely on whether they were on track for the month without working out whether they had an upcoming Flex payment.

We’ve decided it’s best to build Flex as its own account in Trends

This will give everyone who uses Flex greater control and visibility going forward, such as the ability to include Flex spending in targets, or not.

This will take time to build. So we had to decide whether to delay launching targets or not.

We thought it would be better to go ahead and launch targets, to give everyone who uses Monzo a great money management tool. And we’d build Flex as an account quickly after.

:pensive: We know that for some of our users this will impact the categories and money management processes you have set up and we’re sorry for the frustration this will cause while we properly integrate Flex with Trends.

To lessen the confusion about Flex payments in targets, we decided to temporarily reduce the visibility of Flex in Trends by recategorising Flex repayments as transfers

Doing that means targets works for discretionary spend as people expected.

However in the short term, it means Flex doesn’t work with Trends properly. We should’ve let you know about that in advance, as well as our plans for Flex having its own account in Trends.

The best thing to do for now, is to manually re-categorise your Flex payments

:pensive: We’re sorry, we know this isn’t an ideal solution and it’s time consuming. We’re working on giving you visibility of Flex payments in Trends as quickly as possible.

The Flex and Trends teams are working hard to make this happen. As soon as we have a date for it to go live, we’ll let you know.

We’ll also let you know when an early version of Flex in Trends is available to test in Labs so we can use your feedback to make it the best it can be.

Thank you all for your continued feedback and support :pray:

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So I have seen the Promotion offer pop up today - it asks me to update my app to the latest version

When I click to update the app it takes me to the Google Play store… I am on IOS app 5.5.0

Any suggestions on why it’s doing this / how to sort?.

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I think it’s both. It is committed spend that I need to repay, but it’s also £20 against Shopping each month.

I really don’t agree with what you’ve done and how you’ve done it, but I do appreciate the updates about it.

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Go to the app store and update your app. You don’t have to click the link.

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Is the offer not there if you look at your flex section in app?

Edit. Check what @Revels said above first. I didnt notice that

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I think this is the issue:

It should be taking them to the IOS app store equivalent.

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It should, but I solved the “how to sort” part.

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Firstly thank you & @TomMills for the updates. Seeing this level of interaction is really great and is, for me anyway, much appreciated.

Can I ask two things - one might be an @AlanDoe thing. Can someone pin the targets post as it is really hard to find it.

Secondly, and specific to this quote I appreciate the decision to give everyone targets early but it should’ve been via labs and it should’ve had this disclosure in the first place, in my opinion.

Giving people new features to “test” that are not complete and you can enable/disable them with full sight is a very different thing to rolling out a feature that is clearly not finished, and then expecting everyone to live with the bugs and errors it causes.

I would hope in future that something like this would’ve been a labs release, if possible.

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I’ve tried that, updated to the latest version and the message still appears

When you go to Flex, does it show the offers? Can you Flex something over 6 months interest free?

No doesn’t show offers in Flex, just at the top of my account feed

If you try and Flex something you’ve already bought, is the offer option there?

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just checked mine and its upped to £6000 now

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Not sure if it is new, or I just never noticed, it seems that Flex under manage tab has statements now.

They are leaving a lot to be desired.

There is no account number or reference, ie. at least the same one as used in credit reference agencies would be nice.

All transactions are completely anonymous. The actual purchase remains on the main account statement.

Not sure if I like or not, that statement does not disclose if something was bought on the debit vs credit card.

I really like NatWest BNPL statements instead.

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I guess this is part of the, we’re moving Flex to be it’s own standalone account along with the community requests for statements.

You’re right though I’ve just looked, and it’s just garbage. Really doesn’t mean much at all, I’d sooner have no statement if that’s what it’s going to detail. It needs a lot of work doing to it.

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