Thanks for your help everyone. Hereās a summary of my week in South Korea.
In the end, I had 10 successful payments out of 17 (~60%)
I tried 2 ATMs, both failed with 2 attempts each. Magstripe was on for the second ATM. This included the ATM in Myeongdong which local tourist assistants direct foreigners too.
Monzo support was very good via the chat. They accept that there are some issues in South Korea which they are working to resolve. I sent them some pictures of the āpoint of salesā and this is useful to them.
It may be a coincidence, but the card started to be more successful with time.
Conclusion: Do use your card in South Korea, but have a backup. And bring cash.
Why do you assume that? I donāt have enough information to knowā¦
So you know my theory, I am suspecting the contactless was in magstripe mode with a poorly formatted authorisation message. The response code in this case would be CVC1 mismatch. Just a theory, thoughā¦ there isnāt enough info in the post to know
Correct, and I also changed my post from decline to response. A CVC mismatch isnāt necessarily a decline, thatās up to the card issuer. Many issuers in the US, for example, will authorise transactions from Coke machines despite this.
Iām having difficulty paying with Monzo and havenāt got any cash and canāt find an atm to take Monzo (my other card NatWest visa debit is old and the strip isnāt working!!) I just assumed iād Be able to pay by contactless everywhere ā¦ Anyone know am Atm in Gangnam that you can use Monzo?
No idea whatās happened compared to my prepay monzo which I used with zero issues in Korea last year, but this year is pretty awful. One successful transaction using swipe at a self.pay machine, everywhere else all terminals (including same shopping malls it worked last year) all have failed miserably.
I wonder if something changed this year with monzo partners here? Either way, the card is pretty much useless at the moment, so make sure to take back ups.
Currently in South Korea and i havent been able to withdraw money from the ATMs that I have tried, with my mag strip activated. I have only tried Woori bank at the moment. However, my Monzo card has been accepted in some shops.
Bit scary if you only take a monzo. Luckily I have my Starling card too, which so far hasnt failed once.
Iām a UX designer living in South Korea.
I search that Monzo is a great user experience app.
So I want to benchmark, but I cannot use it in Seoul.
Does anybody living in Seoul can help me?
I can buy a coffee
Iām visiting Seoul for 2 weeks. In our first few days, we had difficulties to make Monzo work. Here is my brief experience with it in case it helps anyone:
Monzo is working with about 60% rate so far. They are using very different payment system than UK. They stick your card into a terminal on their side and payment is done without any signature or PIN. A few times I managed to use contactless as well.
There are several unsuccessful payment attempts which donāt even appear on Monzo app. In these cases, I think that means shops terminal doesnāt support MasterCard or foreign cards in general. We used an alternative card in these cases.
A few transactions appeared in Monzo app as declined and I contacted support for those. Thankfully Monzo support is very helpful. They said: - āYour offline pin had got out of sync, so I have resynced that. You will need to make a chip and pin transaction for that to take effect.ā Well, I did use my card after this successfully and didnāt get the same issue so far. So if you have declined payment. Chat with support, they might be able to help.
ATM cash withdrawals are really unreliable. KB bank generated an āerrorā receipt telling me to talk to their staff. They had MasterCard logos but I assume they donāt support it properly. Another ATM had āGlobal ATMā sticker, but there was no option to withdraw moneyā¦ Another one actually worked but added 3600 won charge for the transaction. At this point, I was willing to pay to be able to get cash out. In short, bring some cash if you can.
An interesting transaction was at a coffee shop. I made the payment, it appeared on Monzo fine. Then I got another notification saying same payment got refunded! Staff asked me to use another cardā¦ Iām guessing that shop had to pay more interest if I used a foreign card or something and they didnāt like it.
Tips:
Enable Magstripe flag every day before you go out, in case you donāt have mobile internet / WiFi available outside.
My Monzo card works probably less than 50% of the time. However, every time I have used my TransferWise (beta) card, it has worked. They both use the mastercard network. I generally didnāt bother enabling magstripe (cashiers attempt to use it maybe 10% of the time), and have given up with Monzo in SK for payments as I have other cards which donāt fail.
I would highly recommend that you bring another card with you. Starling and Revolut (and TransferWise, but not as recommended) are also other great banks similar to Monzo.
One ATM charged me in EUR!
I withdrew money from an ATM which said it would charge in KRW, but found that it charged me in EUR instead! I definitely followed all of the normal advice, and told it to convert using my bank rate rather than theirs. Their KRW to EUR conversion was awful, costing me about Ā£5. Plus I paid around 3600 KRW as a fee. This worked out as about an 8% fee when attempting to withdraw 150,000 KRW (~ Ā£100). Iām not sure which ATM this was - it was outside a 7/11 and had no English writing.
I would recommend having internet when you use your card with an ATM. You can then put in an incorrect pin code and Monzo will inform you a failed withdrawal occurred. It will also tell you how much it tried to withdraw, and in what currency.
Attempted to use monzo in various places in seoul, unfortunately each time it failed even though mags trip. Luckily I always carry multiple cards and used my revolut card which worked right away with no problems
I canāt remember if the explanation was posted to the forum but Rika explained this in the Monzo Slack. (Iām not techy and donāt actually know the detailed explanation so @Rika might want to step in here!) but long story short this issue wonāt exist with the new batch of cards. If you are visiting Korea again soon it might be worth asking in-app for a card replacement?
Indeed, Iām not certain on exactly if it has gone out/when it will go out in our card stocks but we found a few issues specific to some terminals in South Korea that have been resolved in a new revision of our cards.
Great to hear that there is a solution coming for now I can use revolut anyway and I would advise anyone traveling to Korea who does not have one of the newer cards to also pick up revolut, charity or starling as a alternative
Looking forward to the updated card keep up the great work monzo team
So ughmā¦ Monzo has been working fine at all shops and restaurants so far but ATMs are a pain.
WooriBank straight-out refuses the cards (tried Monzo Mastercard and Revolut Visa).
Shinhan Bank ATMs accept foreign cards for a fee of 3600 KRW, which is roughly Ā£2, however some machines just fail and print a failure message on the receipt, nothing in app, that should not discourage you, keep trying - there are usually 4-5 machines inside bank branches so one of them might work, as it did for me.
I wasnāt too keen on paying ATM fee, however, I made a mistake of not buying TMoney card (equivalent of the Oyster card in London) from the airport and supermarkets seems to require using cash for purchasing such card. It is TMoney requirement, that top-up need to be done with cash (regardless of where you do it e.g. supermarket or a machine on the undeground), however I read online that some places (7/11 for example) will allow you buy the travel card (4000KRW) with a debit/credit card, but not top up. Sadly when you need to travel you need to travel so Iāve used what I found on the street near my hotel.
As an update - in some stores Monzo card will just fail, but so would any UK Mastercards (tried also with Halifax Clarity) even if the store has MasterCard sticker on the front door. In those cases Revolutās Visa worked every time so I guess lesson here is always to have an alternative networkās card as a back-up. Iāve raised it with the support team and in about 24h (btw pretty poor response time, really, but I did mark it as non-urgent) I got the response that this is a known issue where there is something wrong with the encryption and thus transaction fails security checks. Apparently they are already looking into it, however there is no timelines or even certainty they would be able to fix it.
