Monzo in the media

£800 (plus registration) for zero gain.

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I see there’s a Monzo Closet Ltd registered as well. Wonder if that will also be contested?

They were fined £800

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Silly question but why was they fined £800?

I’m guessing you didn’t read it

To pay Monzo’s costs

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Because they lost, they were made to pay Monzo’s costs for bringing the case.

:point_up: what they said.

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Yeah I didn’t read it very well then. Thank you

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Not always Monzo

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A few observations:

  1. would you look at that, it’s not just Monzo stealing people’s money! Almost as if every bank had to follow the same set of rules. Oh my world!

  2. Somehow these banks always freeze the account when someone is out buying food for their family or for a litter of recently orphaned starving kittens. They must have a food shop-klaxon in the office so they know when to press the big bad freeze button

account closed in May when she was out buying food for her family.

Whether the rules are fair, and whether they need to change, is a different question. I’d be a strong supporter of more transparency and fairer processes. But of course we will never know how many accounts are unfairly frozen (and what unfair means for the bank)

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Almost 5,500 people have joined a Facebook group, ‘NatWest Closed Down Our Account’

This is a thing now then

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Gives them lazy journalists, who just turn out crap on an industrial scale, an easy way to just mess up the articles they write.

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having worked in a bank dealing with these questions, yes that’s absolutely the case, we got these daily.

many of such people are social engineers by trade, they try and use that manipulation skill to get their money back.

after a while you get incredibly desensitised to the ‘account frozen’ sob stories.

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So, just on this there are different versions of fairness. If you nan had just been scammed out of £20,000 and the money was sitting in a now frozen account, with the NCA behind the scenes applying for a court order to have it sent back to her, you might feel unfreezing the account (allowing the person to transfer the money abroad) would be quite unfair too.

On transparency, the tipping off laws are sometimes trivial because it’s obvious to everyone what’s going on, and sometimes really not trivial, a lot of people (as shown by that Facebook group) are still almost entirely naive to the process that’s going on behind the scenes and think it’s just the bank’s decision.

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Oh I agree. But as you say most people already know what’s going on, so I think there wouldn’t be too much harm in allowing the banks to say something in certain occasions.

As it stands now, people can present their sob stories and the “news” can write all about it because the banks don’t have the ability to release facts and figures to rebut the claims. Also in the odd occasion when it is an innocent customer, it can feel like there’s no due process and you’re not allowed to defend yourself or present evidence/appeal the decision

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This is a great interview

He’s not a fan of Anne :joy:

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I’ve not finished it yet, but it’s pretty good so far.

It’s also available on Spotify etc

Google podcasts

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So good!

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Watching it now. So glad Tom is finally addressing some of these things. I remember the first time I saw him in tears. It was to do with extremely poor behavior from a COp in our then newly started Cardiff office which resulted in that staff member getting terminated. I can’t tell you exactly what that staff member did but it was a clear cut case of instant dismissal and it was the first time anyone in the company had really behaved in such a manner.

But what I found really inspiring was that Tom, at that weeks All Hands when recounting the incident, fully accepted the responsibility. There were many reasons why he didn’t have to do that. The Cardiff office at the time was run through a third party. Getting down to brass tacks you could have argued that this person didn’t technically work for Monzo but worked for the third party. It would have been all too easy to dismiss it as the teething problems of a growing business.

Tom didn’t do that. He put his hands up and said the buck stops with me. This is a personal failing on my behalf as a leader. And he was extremely emotional about it despite standing up in front of maybe 80 or 100 of us at that time including new hires. It was an amazingly vulnerable and honest moment that really cemented my respect for him.

Another story I have is that, although I worked progressively less with Tom as the company grew, I did get to spend quite a bit of time with him not long before I left when we did The Future of Monzo at Shoreditch Town Hall which myself and Naji organized and I hosted. I did notice that day that he seemed very different to the Tom I’d worked with a lot in the early days. There were clearly things eating away at him that nobody knew yet, but as an empath I noticed. Sadly, I didn’t feel like we had the relationship anymore or that I didn’t personally have the tools to try and address it with him.

So when he stepped down a few months later, and then eventually left, it didn’t come as a surprise to me because I remembered the things I had noticed on that day. And I was glad that he was prioritizing his mental health.

As for Anne, I’m not going there. But there are enough of us who were around early enough to know, hear and see things, particularly from 2015-2017 to where I’m sure the story will get fleshed out over time.

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But we have Anne to thank for (indirectly) creating Monzo! :+1:

(And no small amount of gin to thank also)

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