Well, it’s just not true that queuing things up is inherently more difficult in an event driven architecture than in your hated legacy one. You may say about “legacy” all you want, but I say: At least it’s working, and they implemented it properly! If Monzo implemented their event queue in such a way to make this more difficult, then that’s plainly a very poor choice by them.
I work for a web hosting provider and one of my jobs is to ensure that our customers’ domains remain working and get renewed. The registrar we use is terribly unreliable and their API endpoint is constantly down. Our domain system is very event driven. And it has absolutely always worked in a way to ensure that renewals and domain changes are retried until the stupid endpoint comes back. Sometimes dozens of times over several hours. And if there is a sustained outage, then we get an automatic alert to the relevant team to investigate. None of this is groundbreaking, earthshattering rocket science. It’s the very basics of dealing with reliance on third parties: You anticipate outages and design your system to cope with them. Even more so, when any kind of network is concerned: Networks fail. It’s not a question of “if”, it’s a question of “when”, “how often”, “for how long”. Monzo’s apparant failure to anticipate and design for this (for DDs as well as Standing Orders) is beyond astonishing. And the fact that beautified Direct Debits are given priority over working ones is just unbelievable for me.
This sort of stuff was acceptable when Monzo was still officially in beta. I’d expect a beta product to show “first iterations”. Betas are for those who are interested in seeing a preview but can cope with shortcomings. But now they are advertising a finished product. They want to be a bank for everyone. I’m afraid they simply aren’t. And this sort of stuff is why they are quickly loosing my confidence that they ever will be. I’d love to use Monzo regularly, because I like many of their ideas. But if I need to watch my phone every month to ensure that my rent SO/mortage DD has gone out, then that’s just not good enough.