It’s not that bad even for comms, as long as your customers are forgiving!
I also really want this feature back and there is no specific regulation, as far as I know, requiring accounts details not to be shown. As others have posted, my guess is that someone has very generously applied the data minimisation principle of GDPR. As this is merely a principle, it is open to interpretation and the overarching approach of GDPR is that data should be proportionate, necessary, and for a legitimate purpose. I would argue that there is nothing about this feature which is contrary to that - having access to the details facilitates payments, particularly return payments, and this is a legitimate purpose. Account details are not exactly secret information, if they are printed on all bank statements and cheques and often debit cards too (although they are personal information). So this appears overboard. If it’s a problem, make the app require authentication before actually displaying the details (ideally suppress the extra request if the user requires authentication to open the app).
If it’s to do with CoP, then it makes sense to simply run the CoP check again on any payment initiated from a previous transfer - to double-check the details are still right. I don’t see why this can’t be done.
Emphasis mine. It is for this reason that they should not be displayed, as (currently) there is no way, upon sending a payment, for the sender of the payment to choose whether or not to redact those details - and it should be their choice. Monzo previously displayed sender’s account details for every inbound Faster Payment - which did not sit well with me.
The return payments idea is a red herring for me - the small number of cases where that’s required, details can be exchanged with the relevant parties only.
I was actually going to address this in my original post but forgot. Thanks for bringing it up.
My take is:
If you are sending a payment to somebody, you trust them already. Implicitly, this makes it OK to disclose relevant information related to the payment to the account holder (including the name of the sender, etc).
I think account details should be treated the same way and I can see no legal reason why not - although I am not an expert.
Edit: Just to add, you are right that the returned payments scenario is a minor number of payments, but it is exactly the sort of thing where elegantly designed digital banking can save you from wasting your time (getting bank details off people, etc) and this should be applauded in my opinion.
This is especially important now that we have to use people’s full name for sending money and not just ‘Laura Halifax’ or ‘Laura HSBC’ etc. We really need some way of seeing where we sent the money!
Hello all, I wanted to give a small update on this issue. We have just re-instated the account details and the “Send money to X” button on outbound payments, on version 3.48 onwards. You should start seeing this appear again on both clients. The payment details will not show on inbound payments for privacy reasons already discussed above. I’d love for us to do some extra work on this to make it show up on as many payments as possible (for example, if the inbound payment was from an account you already have saved as a payee) as it’s a convenient feature. So, stay tuned
Will it ever again be possible to have the “send money to x” for inbound payments, even if the details are kept hidden?
To me that feels like the right thing to do longer term, but we’ll have to investigate whether it meets our criteria and how to achieve it. Unfortunately cannot promise anything!
One question I have or maybe should i say observation is that this is only really used (in my case anyway) for sending money back via inbound payments and not so much outbound.
I checked my legacy bank and it seems it also does not show account details on transactions but does however show them on my statements.
In checking monzo’s statements I now have no way of knowing for payees which have multiple accounts which account I sent money to via the transaction or the statement.
I think below should really be allowed as it shouldnt be this confusing for things like this.
FWIW on incoming payments being a “secret” cos privacy, as a potential business customer in receipt of more payments than the average consumer (and even as a consumer) it would be good to be able to return any overpayments/unallocatable payments exactly back to where they came from - we don’t need to know the details - rather than unwittingly end up facilitating money laundering for scammers who have taken control of someone else’s account to send us money to then ask us to “send it back” to account details we have no way of validating as being the source.
There’s a form of fraud (not sure what it’s called) where someone will send you effectively stolen money, then contact you and ask them to send it back.
Heard an example on the radio a couple of weeks back, where someone sold a car for £700. The buyer sent them £7000 (but from the bank account of someone who’d been defrauded of this). They then contacted the seller, saying how silly they’d been putting an extra zero, and getting them to return £6300, this time to a different bank account. Effectively making the guy selling the car, unbeknownst to him, a money mule.
Being able to just click on the incoming payment and return the money to its actual source would help stop this.
It made sense and it’s not a scheme I’ve heard of before so thanks. I like to think I’m fairly aware in this area but there always seems to be a new twist.
I know some folk purchase cars with bank transfers, but for such high value transactions, for me, cold hard cash is where it’s at. That also stops those type of scams.
My preferred car dealer (a franchised car brand dealer) accept a maximum of £250 in cash, and £1000 in card transactions across the whole network of garages. The rest they expect as a bank transfer.
The UI could still hide those details and just accept a payment amount. BUT I’m not sure how this stacks up with regulators in terms of not being able to see where you’re transferring the money to, so maybe return to sender should be all or nothing.
