Mondo Verification Bug - Who else has been hit?

Have been a member for months, and was successfully verified right at the start (as well as having to be verified as part of the Mondo Investor process).

I got a message from Will in the Customer Service Team yesterday:

We were not able to verify your information during sign up. Unfortunately this means from 11pm Friday your account will be moving to the “before identity verification” limits set in clause 17 of our terms and conditions.
[…]
Fear not though! We;ve sent a prompt to your app through which you’ll be able to send in your identity documentation. Hopefully we can have this all verified for you very soon, and you’ll be back on the higher limits!

Replied explaining I had already been verified, and got the following reply:

Sorry about this. I can confirm you have been verified and do not need to complete the process. The message has been sent to you in error.

All is fine - or so I thought. Two hours later, out of the blue, I get another message from the Mondo team, with a completely different story:

Sorry about this. We recently had a bug in the system which has caused us to require some user verifications to be re-done. […] The prompt will be in your feed in app. Just tap and follow the instructions and you will hopefully be verified in no time!

When I explained that I was already verified (as their own message earlier had confirmed), I was told they couldn’t manually set me back to the verified state without providing my identity documents all over again.

Considering the identity process is a manual one anyway (a real person reviews your video and driver license), and they’ve already confirmed the affected members were verified until a bug happened in their system - why are they not able to just set us back to verified without hassling the user to provide documents for an identity check that they’ve already passed?

Additionally - we seem to be getting told two different stories, and don’t know which is the correct version anymore.

What experience has anyone else hit by this bug had?

I don’t think I have verified myself yet. Didn’t realise I had to or how to go about it.

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@gav Thanks for getting in touch. We’re really sorry for the mix-up. :slight_frown: This is not the customer service experience we want for our users.

I’ll speak to the team member who spoke with you yesterday and get them to come back and clarify the situation via the in-app chat.

We sent the original notification to only affected users. Frustratingly in a very small number of cases there were honest mistakes in the follow-up communication. Sorry it happen to you.

We should have this sorted for you shortly via the app:+1:

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Thanks @willw . Not a problem, but I’m afraid I’m still confused - do we need to re-verify, or not?

I’ve already been verified twice through the Mondo process (when investing + when first signing up). Surely I don’t need to verify again?

I also feel if the original message explained there had been an bug - rather than just telling us we were unverified (even though we already were), the whole situation could have been avoided.

Is this verification only needed in certain scenarios or does everyone need to go through it and you are progressing in phases?

So far I have not completed any additional verification (video/id) but I am not sure of the reason why not.

I believe most people are automatically verified when they sign up but it doesn’t work for some people leading to certain people needing to go through a couple of extra steps to be able to raise the limits on their card.

Indeed - as per Bob’s message. My understanding was everybody was ‘automatically’ verified at sign-up, with a manual step if required.

You can see the different limits applied to verified vs unverified at section #17 here:
https://getmondo.co.uk/terms/

If Mondo want me to verify a third time for ‘added security’ that’s fine - but just wish they’d be honest about it! If they genuinely had a bug, and it’s reset my verified status (which as mentioned I’ve had to do twice already), I’m confused why they can’t just set it back (it’s a manual step anyway).

When you open your :mondo: account, :mondo: does a soft credit check with the details that you provided, and verify your account. If they can’t find (or for some other reason), they won’t verify your account, and you would have to manually send them a photo ID and possibly other documents.

Okay, so I spoke to chat to get my account verified. Not sure if I was/wasn’t before but how do we find out if we are/aren’t verified? Is there an easy way?

I’d imagine, if you where not verified you would have been notified about it as :mondo: needs to comply with AML legislation and part of that process is a KnowYourCustomer check.

As @-removed- said you can ask in the app chat or try and withdraw more than £100 from an ATM or top-up more than £400 in a single day.

A quick test, is to try topping up. If you can press + and go upto around £3700. You are verified.

If you can only do £400, you are not.

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Cool, I was already verified then but was allowed to send in id and a video regardless. Thanks for clearing it up guys :+1:t2:

I’m not a fan of this “you can check if you’re verified by doing this…”. I shouldn’t have to. I had absolutely no idea that I needed to be verified until my husband tried to send me money and he wasn’t able to, they told him that I needed to contact customer support. It was then that I was told that I had to be verified for people to be able to send me money. He was automatically verified on sign up, I was not. They couldn’t give me an answer why. I think for reasons like this there should be a notification in the feed telling you whether you’ve been verified or not so you can know before getting into a situation that’s not convenient to have to verify yourself.

Yeah, completely agree. They should let you know your status somehow. Perhaps on the profile page? But, this won’t be a problem once :mondo: becomes a licensed bank, as I believe you would have to verify before starting an account. Might be wrong though :slight_smile:

Tick on the profile, much like Twitter maybe? :wink:

In all seriousness, exposing that on the profile with a button to go through the verification steps would be a great idea. Maybe incorporate it with displaying your account limits (bonus points if it can show how far in to those limits you are), something that has been confusing in the past with the out of date terms.

Agree. On the original issue…

I’ve been successfully verified twice already. Mondo have confirmed they’ve verified me before, so they still have the data. Why therefore are they requiring anyone hit by this bug to verify all over again? Surely just reset their verification status - it’s a manual task anyway (someone manually reviews your ID + Video).

@willw

  1. A big part of me suspects this is part of your automated fraud detection, and you want certain accounts to provide further identity checks. If that’s the case - fine, I’m more than happy to do that straight away - but just say that! Don’t lie about their being a bug, and send support messages that don’t make any sense.

  2. If there was a bug, and I’ve already been confirmed as verified, I’m really struggling to see a reason why you can’t reset this, without further intervention from your end users

Cheers! :slight_smile:

Like so

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Ya. That means you are verified :blush:

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I can’t remember how much info I provided but I don’t think it was that much. Amazed to see I was verified.

Hey @gav - thanks for your feedback and for raising your concerns. I just wanted to quickly address your two biggest concerns:

  1. This is certainly not part of our automated fraud detection. We would not lie about this being a bug - being open and transparent wherever possible is a core part of how we operate. We had a bug between us and our KYC partners which meant people were “passing” our verification check without sufficient information matching. Once identified, we were obliged to restrict the functionality to the pre-verification stage since we have not had enough information to verify the account.

  2. I’m afraid you have not already been confirmed as verified. The original bug made it seem like you had been verified in our systems but the underlying data didn’t support this. I realise there was some confusion on our end as well - we’re working hard to ensure that doesn’t happen again and we have clearer communications around issues like this :slight_smile:

I love all the suggestions on this thread for proactively reaching out and making it easy to see whether you are or aren’t verified in the app. The product team are working on creating a solution to this so keep the feedback coming :+1:

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