I just thought of this this morning. The Monzo API is fantastic - real time access to your account. And now they do business accounts - that’s lightning in a bottle. You can now do this - imagine you go to an online store, pick a few items, enter your delivery address, delivery by tomorrow etc, etc, then you come to the payment part. Strangely alongside MasterCard and Visa is ‘Bank Transfer’. Bank transfer? For an order coming tomorrow? Won’t that take hours for customer services to verify the transaction? Whatever.
So you click on Bank Transfer and it asks you for your sort code and last four digits of your account number. You’re then given the company account to send the money to. Just below that is some text that says ‘Checking for your payment…’. The customer sends in the money then and there by mobile banking, then the website back end uses the Monzo Api to see the incoming transfer and you can see the bank account and sort code it came from so you can instantly verify it is that customer. The page refreshes immediately with an order confirmation.
That’s every bit as fast as MasterCard or Visa. No chargebacks. No fees. And it’s instant. It could change the face of commerce
This is pretty much what Zapp (now known as “pay by bank app”) was promising several years ago - customer to merchant payments through the Faster Payments system. I’ve no idea whether what they’ve rolled out recently has ended up being anything like that.
I wouldn’t implement it like this, I’d make it so alongside the MasterCard or Visa option you had a Monzo (or a UK Bank option that then allowed you to select Monzo). At that point it redirects you to a Monzo page/login and then asks if you’re happy to give £x.xx to merchant yyyyy for products zzzzz, delivered to address aaaaa (much like paying through PayPal). It’d then transfer the money to a Monzo account for that business and report back to them that the payment had been made.
Originally, I think the idea was you’d be able to use it in-store as well. My concern with Mastercard now owning it is that I think they’ll intentionally hold it back, as they don’t want it undermining their card network from which they earn fees. It used to be a competing payment network, now it’s another Mastercard-owned one.
The thing I like about future Monzo commerce / faster payments commerce is thanks to Monzo’s great API, you don’t need another company; you can just do it yourself
It used to be a competing payment network, now it’s another Mastercard-owned one. 