Sorry, I didnāt mean to imply this, and donāt expect Monzo to publish purchase values. I meant to say the local authority approach is one sort of transparency.
Yes of course, but some suppliers are certainly not based in the UK, nor pay corporation tax in the UK. The payment services provider with problems seems to be in United Arab Emirates, AWS is owned by Amazon Inc, and MasterCard is also in the US. Iād simply like a list of who they are and where they are based. Using a supplier is investing in them as well, both in terms of money, and in trust.
Iād like to see Monzo include a report on employee diversity -
% By gender / ethnicity
Salary parity for equivalent roles
Number / % of women & ethnicity of the team, in senior roles
And Iām sure the HR team has some more metrics that theyāre paying attention toā¦
In fact, Iāve just had a look on LinkedIn & it appears that ~20% of Monzoās team are women so it appears that thereās some room for improvement here? For comparison, it looks like 33% of Starlingās team on LinkedIn are womenā¦
and to ensure no religious discrimination a breakdown for religious groups too. I know this done in Northern Ireland but I have also seen discrimination against Roman Catholics in the City.
For anyone who has missed it, Maria, who wrote this post will be hosting a live Q+A via periscope at 5.30pm today. Post us your questions here if you have any and tune in
As Monzo starts to offer more complex products I wanted to ask about the principles behind how items appear in the Feed and whether the Feed entries form part of a permanent transaction record? (and if not there, where?)
At the moment most items (transactions, PIN changes and declines) seem to appear and remain in The Feed.
Not so crowdfunding which appeared then was removed when the opportunity to pledge closed.
Part of being a Bank involves providing an audit trail for customers and their advisors. Being able to verify what your income and expenditure is remains important so being able to see all your income and expenditure while eliminating items that are not part of that income and expenditure is therefore crucial.
Yes for many of us being able to see where someone attempted to use my lost card is interesting but these are not my transactions. Being able to filter or remove them would help. Particularly if the card loss was traumatic.
Even with the best systems misposts will happen too. Will these be contraād or removed entirely without trace?
All this becomes more important with a running balance in a current account so for now some comments from Monzo on the principles it will use for Feed transactions in the current account would be helpful please.
While youāre waiting for an update from the team - this use case sounds quite similar to the reason why a dedicated notifications tab might be useful.
I expect Hugoās comments on siloing certain notifications, in the below topic apply here too -
I can definitely see a need for this sort of thing once Monzo integrates with other providers & thereās a lot more feed items in the feed. But at the moment, I personally donāt find them that hard to manageā¦
Hey Mike, I donāt think the principles which help us decide if information is āfeed-worthyā will change drastically from the set of considerations we use now. Ultimately, we see a lot of value in filtering out noise and presenting you with the relevant information in this part of the app. @hugo can probably shed some more light here.
All transactional data which appears in the feed is stored by us forever, but this wonāt be directly linked to the individual customerās data once they leave the bank.
Iām not quite sure what you mean by misposts? For any duplicate or erroneous transactions, the original transaction and the relevant credit back to the customer will both remain as part of the transaction history.
Thatās a very good question. At this stage we donāt really have a defined set of principles about what should or should not remain in the feedā¦ same for notifications. That will probably change at some point, just not yet
So far weāve been making the call with every new thing we produce, based on our experience and a fair amount of user testing.
Something else youād like to know we do is to always release this kind of feature first to a small proportion of our user-base and wait for their reaction. So if we get it wrong (we sometimes do), only a few of our users are affected and we can fix it before rolling out to the remaining ~99%. I hope it makes sense
Thanks @hugo Hopefully this will be something to think about as the service and range of items develops so that the feed fulfils a consistent function as well as responding to potentially inconsistent feedback. It will be good to hear how the approach to the feed is developing as part of the transparency hub. What different users want from it and how these wishes are squared will be interesting!
Not sure whatās going to happen when you start introducing items from third party APIs to the feed
Thereās a big piece of work to be done precisely about that.
We havenāt decided yet, one alternative is to try to curate and āapproveā integrations and only let them send notifications or even feed items if they follow a set of rules.
Another alternative would be to make it a bit more open but give powerful tools to users to tune what kind of actions want to authorise and integration to do (from āthis app can see my balanceā to āthis app can send me notificationsā).
The right solution would probably be somewhere in between
Hi @Naji By mispost I was referring to say someone quoting a wrong nine digit code on a credit meaning the credit ended up with the wrong user. Or a fraudster misdirection credits to his account by changing remitted details through fraud. Cheques sent to Monzo for collection could be keyed by mistake to the wrong account.
Collected cheques could be unpaid. etc.
Even with the best systems things get onto the wrong account or have to be reversed.
While Iām guessing that you have a modulus check digit in account numbers to reduce the incidence of error some misposts could result.
The approach on whether to contra or remove the transaction entirely could depend on the nature of the mispost. E. G. If crime is involved not alerting the criminal to detection.
I think there should be a real emphasis that the bank acts first and foremost for the CUSTOMER. All to often, with traditional banks, it seems they are being run for the regulator and compliance teams. And while that is of course important, that should NOT drive the business. Which it now seems to be doing in big banks. As a customer of a big bank I feel they would sacrifice my interests (and confidentiality) in a heartbeat, when the bank should have its loyalty to the customer. I am hoping Monzo will be different in this regard.
Hi Jonathan, Thomas, Head of Risk at Monzo hereā¦
I couldnāt agree more - our goal is to act for you and all our customers first, ensuring we give you the best banking experience possibleā¦
Our regulator is mainly concerned with the stability of the Bank (i.e. do we have enough money) and whether we treat our customers fairly, so I actually donāt know if they are truly to blame. I think the real problem lies in the way regulations and laws are interpreted ā¦ this is what causes frustrating situations for customers as a result of poor or overzealous interpretation of rules or guidelines.
Here weāre trying very hard to avoid that situation at Monzo, so while we always want to be fully compliant with the rules and regulations, we equally will ensure that in doing so, we donāt impact the experience or interests of our customers, (that being said there are certain situations which require us to follow more strict rules that relate to Fraud, Financial Crime and Money Laundering rules ā which Iām sure youād want us to adhere to!)
Thanks for the reply, which makes sense. As you say, it may well be that the internal compliance people in banks, in a ābackside covering approachā, go over the top and jeopardise customer relationships. By all means follow the rules, but never forget the customer is king and that is key
Iām surprised to see nothing on privacy of usersā data: who has access to transaction info, which third-parties it is or will be shared with, etc.
I came back to check for it because thereās been several questions about it recently, particularly with regard to third-parties such as Flux and Tail.
Building on this, and as raised in the thread about Monzo-to-Monzo payments, the transparency page should provide details on how Monzo uses data on your phone which it asks for access to (contacts, photos, etc), including what gets sent off the phone, in what form, and where to. The second post in that thread details this for contacts data with regards to P2P payments, but I think there needs to be a statement that covers the app as a whole, and all categories of data Monzo requests permissions for.
