March Monthly Update

They probably mean on a product basis rather than the physical card network. For example in an alternative universe, Virgin Money Credit card could have been the first choice, not MasterCard per se.

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I wondered that, too. Maybe It’s just based on which credit cards are paid from Monzo accounts?

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Do we know how each next integration is being determined?

Its would be good to poll users as to which credit cards they have and start with the most popular.

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This is something I’ve not seen discussed in the forum until now. I reached the same conclusion as you did. It must be based on the activity within monzo.

I never considered this credit card that popular, as I’ve always seen It was a premium product.

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Not a poll no.

I think they should be able to see the number of transactions against a credit card and use that, actual data versus ‘those who know about a poll and vote in it’?

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It could be the case that Amex have a better API than some other providers so it’s easier for Monzo to integrate them into the app.

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Good point. I think this is more likely.

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Could be. But that wouldn’t make it the most popular credit card with Monzo users.

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They have more than enough information about direct debits and manual card payments to credit card companies to work out a good enough guess about which is the most popular surely? Even just checking which transactions have credit card numbers starred out should give a rough idea. It might even be that Amex is the most popular based on how big the payments are? (Can’t imagine many people with Amex cards are paying the minimum and guess they’re likely to have high statement balances if they are paying for everything on it to get points? Who knows without the data this is all just guess work, they might have just guessed it was Amex too!)

Also, far as I’m aware Amex doesn’t have a public API so it’s gonna be a password thing (which I believe open banking made ok for customers to do now and not have the banks wipe their hands if something went wrong?)

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Looks like it’s TrueLayer. Which uses your credentials and scrapes the info if I’m correct?

That’s correct :slight_smile:

Any news on updated accounts view on iOS?

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https://community.monzo.com/t/a-new-look-for-the-account-tab/57705/163

Hey Dan,

We’re making progress on the new account tab on iOS. We’ve enabled it for all staff for testing, and working through some UI bugs we’re finding. We hope to start rolling it out soon, just need to strike the right balance of speed and polish.

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Ahhh that’s amazing news @Jami thanks for the update :slight_smile: it’s been a while so looking forward to both that and pot images! Keep up the good work mate :tada:

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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!

:bow:

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I didn’t know that! Great news - thanks for sharing. :credit_card:

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I think that’s the case, at least. We’ll see!

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I wonder how popular Post Office cards are (i.e. how far up the list they are for this). Their website is awful…

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We don’t currently see many people paying off Post Office cards via Monzo - and I don’t think they’re currently supported via any APIs. That might change over this year though.

This feature will very much be limited by what is on offer from providers themselves, or aggregation companies - unless we start doing credential sharing / screen scraping ourselves, but I don’t think that’s something we want to start doing now as the market is moving to a better approach.

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