Joint Accounts to have the same features as personal accounts

I am confident that there are many people like me that don’t even use a personal account but instead use the joint account as a main account.

Please can monzo release the same features and capabilities to joint accounts when they release to personal accounts. If they are not ready to do so, then delay the release to personal accounts (unless beta testing) until they are ready to do so.

This way anyone who wants to still have that feature on a personal account can join the beta, when its ready ALL accounts get the same functionality.

Believe me if it was as easy as this it would already have happened.

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i never said it was easy… good things never are

If this is very difficult, it’s a sign of a much bigger software architecture problem. Personal accounts should be a subset of joint accounts: essentially a joint account with just one account holder and some aspects hidden away. If they’re building features around one account holder specifically, they’re really running up a lot of unnecessary technical debt they’ll have to pay back later.

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Personal accounts were launched long before joint and they had to do some major backend work to allow joint accounts. So I don’t think it’s a design or technical issue

would that suggest it’s a business decision?

The launch date isn’t really relevant to whether this is a design issue or not. The software should have been written to be compatible with one or more account holders from the start.

In the same way, if they’ve designed joint accounts around a tuple of account holders a and b, that’s also a bad design. There should be a list of account holders, even if that’s a list of one for personal accounts.

I work in this area (software development). You can’t make any assumptions.

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No. As joint accounts still aren’t reported to Transunion I think that’s the reason why loans and overdrafts aren’t available

There has been enough demand from the forum and staff have said they want this as well. Assessing 2 people and the risks if one has a great credit history and the other has CCJs doesn’t sound all that easy to me

Just a guess tho

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We’re not talking about loans specifically.

Why would they design for a thing they never had any intention of building though?

Right from the start they said they weren’t going to do a joint account but so many demanded it that they built it

Lending products and IFTTT, what else is missing?

Because that’s what good developers do. They make their software flexible and easy to change. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

it might not be super simple i agree, but the banks have been doing it for many many years, and they use so much legacy crap too…so cant be “impossible” to do. I dont even have a personal account with my other bank… never have… and have overdrafts etc with the wife …

Just prefer a more modern way to do banking which i think monzo can offer, if they manage to sort the basics like this out… i’m hoping they do…

And that’s the thing. You want Monzo to do things in a modern way but at the same time copy legacy banks.

Yes they could copy them 100% but maybe they’re trying to think of a new and better solution?

not what i said at all…

I said legacy banks have been doing it for ages with battered mainframes and crappy back ends…

I want monzo to offer the same functionality , in a modern way, having a joint account that works the same as a personal account really should be that hard…

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I disagree. The assumption I’m making, based on the evidence of feature parity between account types is that they have concrete implementation of various features for personal accounts rather than abstract implementations that share code between different types of accounts.

By a modern way you just mean copy the same legacy decision making methods into a pretty app?

not at all, i mean offer a similar functionality…

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If a joint account was just two personal accounts in the same view, I’d agree with you. But they’re more complicated than that.

Lending decisioning is more complicated. It’s not just what account a + account b is eligible for.

If the hierarchy was literally a joint account is an object that contains two personal accounts, you’d also get duplicated and unuseful concepts like Summary. In this instance, they’d be two personal Summary’s so that’d have to be factored into Summary to handle multiple users. And then there’s budgeting, and then there’s bill splits. But wait, payees need to be separated, card controls, 3D secure and help chat need to be different/seperated.

So now you’re left with half the code being relevant and half not.

Joint Account fundamentally needs to be it’s own account type that has two users. Rather than an account type that has two personal accounts.

I’m positive tonnes of the code is pointed to the same place - their architecture is microservices so any code that is common to both account types will just point to the same place.

But Personal Accounts and Joint Account fundamentally work differently, and I suspect as Monzo make more and more custom features that traditional banks do not have, we’ll see more features that only work for Personal Accounts or only work for Joint Accounts or work very differently between account types.

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