In the terms it says “We might stop you using Flex for new transactions (including blocking your virtual Flex card) if:you haven’t used Flex for at least two months.”
Does anyone know if this is actively enforced, if I don’t flex anything for two+ months will they withdraw the facility?
I doubt it’s done at the moment, but it’ll be a clause to allow them to reduce their lending allocation for people that never use it. The same as they did with overdrafts in the past (once, only, ever, for people who had never ever ever used it).
You’re probably fine, and I’d imagine they’ll probably warn you ahead of time. But I’m sure @TheoGibson can say yes or nay to my interpretation
I thought I’d give you a little bit of behind the scenes info on how Flex works and some changes we are making.
Today, when you make a transaction on Flex it’s actually processed with the current account as an intermediary. By initially building Flex in this way we could re-use more of the customer support tooling, dispute processing and other functionality of the current account.
The processing looks like the following:
The net impact on the current account is £0 but there is an inflow and an outflow.
Here is the same transaction as displayed in part of our tooling:
This results in two transactions on the current account, one negative one and one positive one. In the feed in the app these are collapsed and hidden but they do appear in statements:
We are now migrating to “direct virtual card” where we will no longer bounce money via the current account on the way to Mastercard. All staff accounts have been running in this mode for several months and we are planning to start a gradual customer rollout next week.
What will change?
Hopefully, mostly nothing but if migrated you may notice:
Flex will appear as an account via Open Banking and can be connected to third parties (if they support it)
Flex transactions will no longer clutter up bank statements on the current account and Flex statements will look a bit better
If the transaction is made directly on Flex then it won’t appear on the export from the current account but the repayments from the current account will appear.
Do we have any indication when this happens for us IE a notification to explain?
No, we’d only send a notification for a large product change and not some background change that doesn’t require any action from the customer.
This has been visible in open banking through revolut for months
Only for you because your account was a staff account when we did the internal migration.
It doesn’t show my balance obvs and won’t pull anything through to see in Revolut.
The balance not showing was the one remaining blocker on customer launch and should be fixed today. Nothing being pulled through to Revolut will be a problem on Revolut’s end – it works fine in Emma app for example.
Seems sensible. I take it that there won’t be any app related changes (at this stage) like Flex in Trends or a dedicated feed for the Flex credit card?