Hey everyone,
As you may have seen, we’ve been working on letting you see your credit card balances within Monzo, to help you avoid being surprised by your monthly bills.
Today we’re excited to bring an early version to Monzo Labs, starting with support for Barclaycard cards.
What’s included in the first version?
- You can link Monzo to your Barclaycard account, and see your card balances in the account tab.
- If you’re using iOS, opting in will also turn on the new iOS Account Tab, which needs some polishing before we enable it for everyone.
Why only Barclaycard?
We wanted to start with just one card provider, to make sure the feature is useful before putting lots of work into handling the diversity of lots of card types. We started working on American Express because it’s the card provider we see the most Monzo users regularly paying, but ran in to some connection issues, so moved to the second most popular, Barclaycard.
How Does it work?
We’ll use TrueLayer to securely connect your credit cards to Monzo. TrueLayer are an FCA-regulated service provider. When you connect, Truelayer gets read-only access to your other accounts which lets Monzo display your info. We’re using Truelayer because it helps us build and test something quickly, and integrate with other credit cards and banks in the future with less additional effort. They’ve put a lot of work into taking a bunch of disparate APIs and providers, and standardised them as much as possible for companies like Monzo.
How does it work?
- Firstly, make sure you have app version 2.40.0 or newer installed, then opt-in to the feature in Monzo Labs.
- After you opt in, we’ll send you a feed item linking to the feature tour and authorisation flow.
- From there, you’ll be taken to a TrueLayer-powered screen, where you can enter your Barclaycard login details
- TrueLayer securely stores those, and uses them to provide us with your balance and some other basic card information.
- A few minutes after connecting, you’ll see your card listed at the bottom of the account tab, and we’ll automatically refresh the information a few times a day.
- If you want to remove the integration, opt-out of the feature in Monzo Labs and we’ll remove your information from TrueLayer.
When will this come out of Labs? Is this a final version?
We’re releasing quite an early version of this feature. We don’t expect the broad strokes to change much, but we know there is a bunch of small refinements needed before we can enable the feature for everyone.
We’ll take this feature out of Labs once we have the confidence that the connection flow works, and that the balance information displayed is correct. What’s most important is that the feature is usable (and safe for the general population), rather than feature complete.
Once the basics are in place, we can start building on top of them as part of other projects.
What are we looking for feedback on?
- If the connection flow works, or not
- If your balance and available credit are correct, or not
- Whether or not it helps to see your balance listed within Monzo.
- What problems you think this could solve for you, with a little more work.
Current Limitations and known issues:
- Balances don’t update realtime, they’ll update about once a day. This is limited by the how often the card provider updates their information.
- We’re only displaying balances for now, no transaction data - nothing will affect your feed or budgets.
- If Barclaycard owe you money, you’ll still see a negative balance in the Monzo app - we’re working on a fix for this with TrueLayer currently.
Thanks for helping us test, looking forward to hearing what you think!
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Shiny new screens 
so that’s the limit of my screenshotting ability today 