Monzo Card refused

Apologies if this is the wrong place for this but just back from a stay at the cotswolds farm park (a camp site and farm) and had some issues with using my monzo card.

On entering the farm I was told that the card machines wouldn’t except monzo cards. Apparently they had previously worked but had recently stopped excepting them (the machine not the business)

In the adjacent farm shop they were able to process a payment by ‘borrowing’ a newer card machine that excepted contactless payments from their cafe. Apparently this is a regular thing they have to do whenever presented with a monzo card.

Not sure where the issue lies with this since at the end of the day it’s a MasterCard it should work anywhere? Contactless or not. Would this likely be an issue with older card machines or something monzo can investigate to resolve future issues?

Essentially (as I understand it) there is a list of acceptable card prefixes (the first 6 chars on the card), which card machines hold locally. If this is not updated, any new cards issued won’t be recognised, which is what I think is happening here, hence their need to use a new machine.

TBH Monzo as a debit card has been around for enough time by now that this kind of thing shouldn’t happen, but the obligation is on the holder of the card machine to update that list, and clearly they haven’t, for whatever reason.

I believe you can report this kind of issue to acceptance@monzo.com and they have a process to encourage people to update their systems.

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Brilliant, thanks for the reply - all makes sense. I’ll email the address you suggested to report it. Thanks again.

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