For those asking about why we’re focussing on American Express first. It’s because it’s the card provider we see the most Monzo users making regular payments to. We want to make sure we can test with as much real data and usage as quickly as possible - whilst also keeping the scope of a first version small by focussing on one provider.
The way these integrations work - you link up with the bank/provider, rather than the card processing company like MasterCard/Visa. Amex is a bit of anomaly because it is kinda both.
As American Express (and most credit card providers) don’t offer an open banking API yet - we’ll start by working with an aggregation partner, using credential sharing (you enter your login details, they securely store them, and use them to fetch data and make it more consumable for banks like us).
Our plan is to test if the Amex integration is useful, then if it is -expand to the other credit cards that are supported by our technical partner. By September this year the biggest UK banks will need to provide open banking APIs for their credit cards, so we’ll move over to using those APIs instead of credential sharing.
Hope this helps!
