Mobile app based banks and re occurring payments

[KLRx]

I work for a shop in UK and we are hounded by customers who use monzo as money is always taking multiple times. It is normally taking again the next day as a pending payment, there’s no charge that shows on our end but shows on customers account.

There has recently started been issues with Starling too. I know that normally, duplicate transactions are neither the retailer or banks fault and seems to be a failure in the digital payment process. The bank has accepted the retailers request to take the funds from customers account, but something “goes wrong” in the payment journey so we don’t collect the funds and they stay in the holding place.

It’s normally when contacless or the first payment has failed so customer has to pay again but the issues with mobile app based banks is different, the card is only presented once but payment is still taking multiple times

So my question is how does this happen? How do these banks seem to put multiple payments into the holding place, does anyone know the technical reasons or digital payment journey for it? Is it something these banks are doing wrong or are their digital payment systems or something just not very good?

Also sometimes the payments are actually fully debiting the customers twice so it looks we have stole there money but this isnt the case we have now idea how this is happening

[Revels]

Hi. Welcome.

At a guess, it’s a mess between the authorisation, hold and final settlement.

All banks will be the same, but because Monzo/Starling show you what’s happening instantly, people can see it. Whereas other banks it happens in the background so people are non the wiser.

[Anarchist (Press ‘Help’ search ‘Contact us’ or email help@monzo.com or call 0800 802 1281)]

@KLRx

I work for a shop in UK

You don’t have to answer, but is it Tesco?

[kolok]

Here’s a bit of an explanation of what might be happening.

Tesco charged me twice

Without getting into many technical details, mastercard card payments are a two step process: when you pay with your card (the authorization), and when the merchant collects the money (settlement). We receive messages from Mastercard for both of these and we need to match them up to say “yep, this settlement message is collecting the money for this authorization”. In some cases we are unable to match them due to data quality issues. In a perfect world, this wouldn’t happen, but in the real wor…

But ultimately it’s an issue on the merchant side , where somebody isn’t following the MasterCard rules to the letter, that could be the acquirer, their bank or potentially the payment system developers.