I usually get paid in the afternoon. Sometimes late in the evening - but then usually a day or two before the official pay day I think my boss processes the payments manually. Personally, I would never dare to have my DDs come out on payday, as it’s just too risky in my situation. All my DDs are timed two weeks after payday. (With the exception of 2 or 3 low value ones that I can’t control.)
It is, however, one of the many ways in which Monzo seems to fall short of other banks: All other banks that I have accounts with allow you to pay in sufficient funds to cover a direct debit/standing order until around 3-4pm. It really doesn’t seem like rocket science to allow for that…
Yeah, I do worry about this - things that other banks do as standard that you take for granted, you should be able up take for granted Monzo will do (especially by now).
With my old First Direct account, timing didn’t seem to matter (in a good way). If my account was wiped out due to DDs going out first thing in the morning, I still had until around 10.30pm/11pm to bring the account back into balance.
that’s the reason I haven’t used this as my main account sometimes we do miss DD coming out and the deadline time other banks offer to add funds to make sure your DD is paid is great, that’s the only thing holding me back right now
The inability for Monzo to automatically retry failed DDs on the same day right is definitely only the blocker to me moving fully - it just seems such s simple thing to be able to do that you take for granted with your legacy bank. I believe even Starling even allows for retrying DDs again.
It pains me that Monzo decline direct debits so early in the morning rather than later in the day. Other banks don’t actually decline until later in the day. It makes me reluctant to move over more important DDs over.
It depends - most automated payroll uses BACS credit which are processed in batches at the beginning of the day just like direct debits are, however some companies (including mine) do it via Faster Payments which are instant and arrive any time, depending on when the order was processed by the sending bank, so if Monzo wishes to cater to those it’s best to delay DD processing up until 23:59 on the day to catch any unforeseen incoming Faster Payments.
It seems simple but is actually way more work for Monzo given their event-driven architecture. In a legacy bank it’s “simple” as the DDs are all queued up and will be processed by the rust in a batch at the end of the day, which as a side-effect gives you time to add funds to the account up until that time.
In the case of Monzo it’s all event driven, there are no queues - as soon as a direct debit comes in it’s processed immediately, with either a success or failure response.
To reimplement the “legacy” behavior it would require having a queue where failed DD’s are placed and every incoming credit to the account would then trigger an attempt to process items from that queue, up until midnight the second day where the failure will be finally reported to the requestor should the account still lack the funds to cover their DD.
I wouldn’t normally have an issue as all my funds would just be sat in the account. And then once all the direct debits are out I can see what is left and if it matches what I expected. It is the use of pots that causes the issue.
So now I have to leave the balance for the DDs in the account at all times. And then remember if I spend on the account I need to move the money over from a pot.
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.
I think my boss processes the payments manually. Personally, I would never dare to have my DDs come out on payday, as it’s just too risky in my situation. All my DDs are timed two weeks after payday. (With the exception of 2 or 3 low value ones that I can’t control.)