Managing Pending Payments When A Lower Authorisation Amount Has Been Taken

[anon44204028]

@alexs

@MIROW your suggestion would work fine but my concern is keeping track of why your adjusted balance is the amount that it is. You need to see what the pending payment is for so that you can see when it’s been paid.

I saw flexibility as you can use this method to take into account…

where a 1p or £1 preauthorization appears but you know what the final value will be

when you order something online but charge not made against card until item dispatched

when you know you are going to withdraw some cash or pay for something next week or later that month

[beningreenjam (Ben Green)]

Again, sorry for the wall of text

Had some time to think about this and read through all the comments of this thread.

At least with my experience of these types of payments, they’re almost always online (iTunes, Amazon, etc), with the exception of paying for fuel at the pump.

Monzo currently have absolutely no way of knowing neither the value or the date the pending payment will be transacted.

I can’t see an ideal solution because the way card payments are made haven’t really changed since the introduction of cards decades ago, before the internet became accessible to the public.

The ideal solution would be for all payments to initiated via the API (the availability of which is on the roadmap here) and include additional data in the payload relating to the subsequent payment. It would only need to contain the amount and date the transaction will be attempted. They would then be able to automatically show in the feed without any need for manual entry.

I can’t see this becoming mainstream quickly after the launch of the feature and possibly never will. But because most of these type of payments are from online merchants as I say then PGP (Payment Gateway Providers) may gradually begin to support it. They would just need to recognise that the card is a Monzo card and initiate the payment via API instead of the conventional card number/expiration date/cvc method.

The only short-term solution I see is manual entry

@alexs

Users can create feed items & record the amount that’s due to paid.
When they create the feed item, they’ll also have the option to search for the merchant that the payment’s due to be paid to. The search will auto-complete & if an authorisation was the last transaction, that payment’s merchant will be suggested. When another payment’s taken, the amount will be deducted from the total pending payments for that merchant. The merchant’s group Id, will be selected by Monzo when the user creates their entry so regardless of the location / id of the merchant who takes the final payment, the pending payment will be matched with the final payment.
The pending payments would need to be flagged in the list of transactions so that users can review them easily & update them if necessary.

The balance minus the amount set aside would be displayed as a secondary balance as @MIROW suggested & the user would be warned when they’re getting close to their balance minus the amount set aside, as @Andy1 suggested.

I don’t think it would be necessary to search a big list of all merchants, instead only the merchants that have previously passed the active card check on your card. They may not always check for an active card before every payment, but they will have done previously at some point.