I’m struggling with the logic behind your reasoning. It has been an issue for 3 days (going into 4) now and you think that not telling anyone is the best course of action?
A simple message along the lines of this would suffice:
“We’re aware of an acceptance issue when paying at Asda petrol stations. We’re working hard to resolve this as soon as possible. For more details see our community forum.”
Then a second message:
“Thank you for your patience, we’ve now resolved the issue with using your Monzo card at Asda petrol stations.”
Two spaced out messages are not spam and I think you’ll find that people care less about the lack of details but will be happy that they’ve avoided a humiliating situation like I had when you can’t pay for a tank of petrol.
I think this would be the best choice course of action. It would 100% be better ignored people knew rather than have to go through the embarrassments of not being able to pay.
It would be spammy if the message wasn’t sent out to all Monzo users, however using transaction data to decide who to notify wouldn’t be spammy.
@HughWells Surely this is how the status page always works - a notification as soon as an issue is found, another once it’s been diagnosed and another when it’s fixed. Why in this case would it not be a good idea to notify users as soon as the issue became apparent?
If this affected me, I’d be very happy to be notified pre-emptively in the app due to past transactions, even if only to say there may be problems with acceptance at Asda pumps and we’re working on it with Asda. It might even help address customers feeling annoyed and blaming this on you.
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Anarchist
(Press ‘Help’ search ‘Contact us’ or email help@monzo.com or call 0800 802 1281)
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They’ve not been too transparent with this issue, though. Anyone not checking the forum would only find out when turn up at Asda.
It’s fundamentally Asda’s issue, though. They should have printed A4 signs at an absolute minimum on petrol pumps and store fronts to make people aware. Monzo have 1.5m customers that could also be Asda’s customers, and like the above comment said - Asda Head office has notified stores, the stores have a duty to inform their customers.
Plus Monzo has had acceptability issues for some merchants for a while anyway. Would it make sense for an ongoing statusboard issue for every single one?
Monzo arn’t having any downtime with any system right now, I firmly believe the responsibility is on Asda.
Woah, my comment made no argument about who your average customer might think is at fault. Not sure how you got there.
My comment was regarding who should take responsibility to inform customers.
Asda has made a very conscious decision to stop accepting Monzo cards. Do you not agree that they have a duty of care to their customers to notify them in a timely manner before purchasing?
Bare in mind, they gave no advance warning to Monzo to notify their own customers, they just (suddenly) stopped accepting cards. Monzo only confirmed there was an issue late on Friday.
I didn’t say who a customer may or may not blame, I said who I believe should be the one delivering the message to potentially affected customers.
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Anarchist
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But, there will be many Monzo customers who have no knowledge of this problem, and who will be setting off to Asda to do the weekly shop tomorrow with their Monzo card. Monzo have an opportunity to warn them to make sure they have alternative payment arrangements. Asda don’t.
Asda have a duty of care as you put it, primarily to their shareholders. The vanishingly small percentage of their customers who use Monzo should be Monzo’s concern.
Just had the same issue at our local Asda service station. Fortunately I had an RBS card to pay for the fuel. I emailed Asda customer services to complain. Pointed out that the card works fine at all of their competitors and I won’t be shopping at Asda until it’s resolved.
Sorry, Dan. Didn’t mean my post to sound confrontational I was just taking the whole issue back to basics. One of my bank cards isn’t working at a specific merchant, for me that’s a problem with that specific bank.
We don’t know yet whether this was intentional I don’t think? The card still works in stores from what I gather in this thread?
For me, if my bank card no longer works in a large retailer then it’s up to the bank to let me know I can’t use it there. It’s an unusual position to be in I think. I don’t remember having these issues with my previous legacy banks but then there was no forum for the information to presents itself to me. For the record I don’t shop at Asda so I’ve not been impacted by this issue and wouldn’t have known about it if I hadn’t stumbled across this thread.
This also did make me make sure I went out with other payment methods today when just walking around town which felt a little unusual.
Have I missed an update from Monzo? The last official word on here was to say that they think they know what’s going on, they’re speaking to various people and it wouldn’t be fair to discuss it on here yet.
Why are there claims being made that Asda has done this deliberately or that it’s Asda’s responsibility to inform customers? I’m not saying that it definitely isn’t Asda to blame, just that without the detail it’s all very presumptuous at the moment.
Unfortunately this tends to lead to a large inbound demand to COps
If we message people without context or information people tend to message us to get more details (that we don’t have).
Mainly because we can’t tell them anything useful at the moment!
It’s a merchant acceptance issue - not a bug. If we create an incident for each merchant acceptance issue we’d have quite a few I appreciate this has the potential to impact a fair few people but until we have some concrete information to share I think the opinion is that we would rather wait for more details and come up with a plan to address this rather than messaging people ad-hoc on a weekend
To clarify, this affects fuel stations only. Not main Asda stores.
From what I’ve heard (anecdotal), Asda staff have been well briefed on what to say by their Head Office to customers which I think is helping to avoid confusion We also have help articles in the app for this specific issue.
We definitely don’t want to shy away from this being a problem we need to deal with and resolve for our customers - it’s one reason we tend to avoid giving out too many details when 3rd parties are involved to avoid giving the impression we’re ‘palming off’ responsibility.
We will probably look at more proactive messaging next week if we can’t find a resolution earlier rather than later We’ll hopefully be able to provide more context to customers then too
Asda are aware of the issues and are looking into them
I appreciate this has the potential to impact a fair few people but until we have some concrete information to share I think the opinion is that we would rather wait for more details and come up with a plan to address this rather than messaging people ad-hoc on a weekend 
