I’d quite like a “Pay outstanding overdraft fees now” option. I tend to go overdrawn on the first couple of days of the month (as I bill clients on the last Wednesday of the month, they then take a few days to pay and then Cater Allen takes a few days to send the payment) and I’d rather not continually see the “£1 overdraft fee to be paid in 28 days” message counting down all month.
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I really like that you can see your possible OD limit before applying it to the account. Too often with banks you have to apply for an amount, get declined, try again for a smaller amount, get approved and then wonder if you could have had a larger amount
My main bank for example I applied for the account and as a part of that process I asked for a small overdraft which was granted. However that then leaves me wondering could I have asked them for more? Only way to find out with them is to go in branch or ring up. Not a problem with monzo
You could go one further and have a screen as a part of the process saying “you can apply for an overdraft limit of up to £xxxxx”. Would stop people having to keep tapping up in £50 increments to see what limit you are willing to grant
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- high five, Monzo *
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So I just got a notification saying I am eligible for an overdraft 
but the UX is odd.
The notification took me to my transactions. And there is a feed item. Selecting this takes me to more info about being eligible but then the only option is ‘Home’ that takes be back to transactions with the feed item. It feels like there should be two buttons ‘Apply’ and ‘Home’ otherwise you have to go searching for how to enable the overdraft.
Just had the same notification here. It did seem a little odd that I had to separately go into the account section, you think it would link automatically from the feed item.
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Yep, I know it’s all very new and they’re just starting to roll it out fully, but my experience wasn’t very Monzo on this:
- Ages ago I registered interest in an overdraft (I have moved salary and all direct debits as soon as I got my account, so overdraft function was the only thing I was missing)
- Didn’t hear anything for ages and have been continually checking this blog for updates
- Got excited yesterday when I saw that roll-outs were happening this week and that if you had IOS (which I do) you could apply for an overdraft in app
- Applied – asked me for my salarly, then got rejected (generic response)
- Asked for some more info in app through the help as I thought it was a little strange, and was told that they couldn’t give me a reason but it was likely because they were just being cautious initially
- I hit the button anyway saying “let me know if I can be given an overdraft in the future” (or something to that affect)
- Today get a notification saying I can have one – hit the button on my feed and it told me to find out more (I think that button should take me straight to application rather than re-reading what I did yesterday but never mind - as noted above I had to go into the account section to action this rather than straight from the feed notification which felt very unintuitive - had I not known it was in the account section users might not find it)
- Got given the full £1000
All in all, not that bothered as I got what I wanted, but steps 3-8 during the course of 24 hours were pretty rubbish and very confusing! Hopefully this is constructive enough account though so Monzo could make changes.
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Yeah my experience was similar. If feels like the in between messages need review. So once you enter salary is should be ‘your request is being reviewed’ some something similar until they give you a decision.
Genuine question (as I appreciated words can come across wrong on forums!) - What is the fascination with an overdraft facility (please move the post if this isn’t the right place for it)?
Everyone has survived on Monzo without one so far, is there really such a demand for it? Do people’s spending habits change if they have an overdraft?
My thoughts exactly. It seems we both went through a similar flow yesterday and today. It lacked a bit of clarity as to why the decision is now to offer an overdraft, when yesterday we were ineligible.
For customers:
- A lot of people need overdrafts to cover their end of month spend
- Others like it as a safety net, to avoid direct debits failing, should the balance be low (or should the hotel hang on to its authorisation for 30 days)
- Some just feel almost insulted when not being offered an overdraft
For Monzo:
- Lending provides income
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They may have survived without one on Monzo as they were probably not using Monzo as their main account, and had their direct debits etc elsewhere backed up by the security of an overdraft on that account. Now they wish to make Monzo their main account they wish to have a similar safety net to ensure their essential bills are paid.
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OK, quite a few questions here so I’m going to try and answer them all! Please remember we’re rolling this out as fast as we can so there are likely to be teething problems. I’m sorry if you run into those though 
We’ll fix them ASAP.
Agreed, this would be really cool! Probably something for the medium term though unfortunately as we’ve got so much else to focus on!
As part of user testing this feature, we explored this. We decided for this version not to do that because we didn’t want to encourage people to take the highest amount they can in our efforts to be a responsible lender.
This is terrible UX and I’m sorry. We’re fixing it!
Sorry, you should have been told the reason. Training 150 customer support people on a feature that’s rolling out quickly doesn’t always go perfectly I’m trying to fix this today so you should be told the reason. Feel free to PM me if you want us to follow up with you specifically!
This is very odd too. I’ll need to look into this a bit more and let you know!
I hope that clears up some confusion! Keep the feedback coming — it’s incredibly useful and hopefully you’ll see rapid improvements from us on all of this 
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My penny on this, I use it as a safety net in case of an unexpected bill, I know there is the buffer on the account.
Also as it becomes “borrowing”, it can help improve your credit score if paid back regularly and on time - when I first turned 18 I got a credit card, bought one game a month with it and paid in full end of the month. This helped show me as a “responsible” person and helped with credit in the future… unfortunately I then ruined that 
but that is another story haha.
Possibly find some more details in the Financial Chat board rather than here though 
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If I’m to move to Monzo full-time, I need an overdraft there. I’m overdrawn every month currently due to recent expenditure, but in only a couple of months, I’ll be out of it again. The amount I am overdrawn is smaller each month as my salary is greater than my typical monthly expenditure (as it should be for anyone). Without an overdraft, I’d be using either a credit card or a short-term loan (both potentially laden with interest). If I have to buy something immediately for whatever reason, then there could be rejected direct debits, which could then cost me even more with late fees on things such as rent, gas/electric, internet, etc. I’d rather spend 50p a day for a few days than a £40 “you paid your rent a week late” fee.
This is a really interesting angle and one we’re seeing a fair bit of 
You can see it in app You won’t be able to get an overdraft bigger than it
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@alexs has just pointed out I misread your question as “what”, when you said “why”. Sorry! It’s not at the moment — we’d obviously love to from a transparency point of view, but we have to be careful from a fraud point of view, especially in these early days. So we can’t tell you the exact details, but suffice to say it takes into account your credit score, internal data we have and other data we get from credit reference agencies
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@Ralph76 As promised, I’ve looked at this and we found a bug which is why you saw that you were ineligible to start with. In short, we have a failsafe in the backend that is designed to stop people getting stuck in the flow. However, it ended up transitioning users from “in progress” back to “ineligible” too quickly. We’ve updated it now so this shouldn’t happen again.
Thank you for raising it! 
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I’ll need to check, but my understanding is that (at the moment) it’s not something we’ll do ad-hoc. It’s based on a bunch of internal rules. So with that in mind, I believe we reassess every month when we get new data from credit reference agencies but I’ll check and confirm!
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This is awesome. Crazy to think that we have this avenue where we can report a problem with our banking experience, it gets picked up on the forum and fixed within a day avec personal notes to explain what went wrong.
Well played @anon50039658 – poor/confusing customer experience turned into a brilliant one 
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I’ve just checked and you’re correct Over the next month or two, we should get that sorted so we can do regular reassessments. I’ll keep you updated of course