Is there a way to remove the "Approve online payments" feature

UK Help
1

Hi,
Whenever I need to make a payment quickly I always have to approve the payment via the mobile app. My problem is that when I need to buy something extremely quickly such as a ps5 or graphics card this payment procedure seems to be slowing me down. Is there a way I can remove it so that when I make a payment I don’t have to approve or do any verification?

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No. That’s the bank checking that you’re you before they take on the risk of authorising your purchase,

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I see, thanks for replying :slight_smile:

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While Monzo seem to do it for every transaction, other banks are a tad more cavalier.

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I’ve started getting it on Google Play as of this week. It’s 1st time I’ve ever had that come through. Not sure if it’s because it’s a new card or something’s changed with the risk profile for these kind of transactions.

Edit - Amazon don’t use it one bit, think it’s down to their payments system

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You’re correct. Amazon do their own thing.

I use both Monzo and Starling on Sainsbury’s. Monzo do authentication every single time, Starling only bother for transactions over £50. Nationwide did it roughly every 10 transactions or so.

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Amazon don’t even ask for the CVV number, never mind 3D Secure.

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Why are Amazon so lax? Or do they have other/better fraud detection?

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This is actually something you will see more often going forward, not only with Monzo, but with every other EU bank. This is because of a regulation named Strong Customer Authentication. You might see it as an annoying feature, but it effectively makes ecommerce payments fraud-proof*, so you’ll be glad it exists if you ever have your card stolen.

*There is a lot more to it. Once the regulation is enforced I’ll write a post on it.

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And to answer your question, this is a security feature which favours both customers and Monzo, so you won’t be able to disable it.

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So Amazon will be forced to use it :thinking: I’ll await to see what the outcome is when that leash on other banks and legislation finally kick in properly.

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Amazon is trying to find smart ways around this. Mostly because their entire business model is around removing payment friction (such as One Click Pay).

One way they will do this is by motivating people to buy gift cards or “top up their balances”. That way you only go through SCA once and potentially use that balance for lots of different payments.

Something else they are doing is called Delegated Authentication. They are going to banks and saying “can I perform the 2-step authentication on your behalf?”. This is because most banks out there have a terrible SCA flow, with an abandonment rate of 20%. Amazon doing it themselves take that down to much lower levels (I’m not allowed to quote their figures)

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We won’t be enrolling on that Delegated Authentication. There is a range of reasons, including cost and regulations. Also, our flow has an extremely low abandonment rate (which is good!), so we don’t need it

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Is your rate lower than Amazon’s?

(Also why don’t people just publish all this stuff? It’s ridiculous secrecy imo).

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Here’s hoping that websites let us check out with Apple Pay and avoid these checks

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A sense of “embarrassment” at people walking away from a purchase?

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Our abandonment rate is around 5%.

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Good question. ecommerce Apple Pay is a form of SCA (I haven’t seen the flow, but supposedly you would have to authenticate on your phone or some other ways).

Recurring payments are out of scope. So the rule is that we must SCA the initial payment (ie. the very first payment on a recurring chain), but not the subsequent recurring payments

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By the way, I use SCA as a verb to mean “require an application of Strong Customer Authentication”. That is, require that the customer authenticates the purchase via 2/3 knowledge/inherence/possession.

At Monzo we do possession (your phone) and one of inherence (biometrics) or knowledge (your pin)

Exactly because SMS opt only meets the possession criteria (ie. the fraudster would only need possession of your phone). So it’s not a valid form of SCA

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Oh joys I can’t wait for the SMS option to vanish, that’s a couple of websites that won’t work at all then :sweat_smile: unless of course they finally fix the payment system to accept the fact I’ve pressed the button in app at Monzo’s end.