I’m Sara and I’m an Android engineer at Monzo. I wanted to let you know that we’ve added a new feature to Monzo Labs for you to test out. It’s a way to merge your payees! This is coming in Android version 2.50 which is currently in beta and will be rolled out next week now available in the Google Play store
This is Android only for now
To merge two payees:
Make sure you have version 2.50+ and have turned on “Merge Payees” in Monzo Labs
Go to the profile page of one of the payees you would like to merge by tapping on their name in the payee list
Tap on “merge” in the overflow menu at the top right
You’ll then see a list of your other payees that you can merge with
Select the payee that you would like to merge with the payee from the second step
Confirm that you want to merge these payees - you won’t be able to undo the merge
Your two payees should then be merged!
Here’s a .gif of it in action:
The name of the payee you selected “merge” from will be the name of the merged payee, unless you have selected a Monzo contact in which case the Monzo contact’s name will be used.
Note: This is only on Android at the moment. We may bring this to the iOS app in the future, but we don’t have any plans to do this just yet.
Why is this in Monzo Labs?
We have a few improvements to this that will be going out in the next release, so we don’t want to give this to everyone yet, but since a number of you have been asking for this feature we thought we’d let you try it out early.
The plan is to roll this out to everyone after getting some feedback from the community and fixing any issues that arise.
What kind of feedback are we after?
We’d like to know if there are any bugs or issues with this feature before we roll it out to everyone.
Not all the payees are available to merge with, is there a reason for that?
Example, I’ve a friend who I’ve sent a bank transfer to in the past (LLoyds) who is now a Monzo customer. I can select the old LLodys contact I have for him, select Merge, but his Monzo contact isn’t in the list of people I can merge with (other Monzo friends are in the list).
Can I ask why is this the case? Developed first on one is fine but for it not to be even planned for the other os is baffling to be honest when its one of the main gripes on here about lack of os parity
Clicking on the three dots to merge also has the delete option, now that there’s also the merge option present, the delete needs a confirmation prompt because I’ve by mistake clicked delete and I’m sure others too.
This feature was developed during Monzo time and unfortunately our iOS developers were working on other projects.
If lots of people use this we’ll look into adding it to the iOS app.
These are great ideas! Because we’re working on other projects we’re not planning on making more changes to the way payees work in the short term.
But it’s definitely something we may look into in the future.
The delay is fine, but having a caveat that people have to use it on Android for it to be added to iOS is poor.
The majority of my duplicates is due to Monzo in the first place where I already had a payee (correct spelling of name etc) then they join Monzo which then creates a separate Monzo payee rather than use the existing account.
Neat feature and a good idea as my payee list looks pretty messy by default.
However, I’d echo the thoughts of some of the replies in this thread. As a user I’d expect to be able to merge any contacts in the app, regardless of whether I’ve paid them through Monzo or not in the past (especially as I’ve just switched!).
Hope you guys get some good usage out of this so it can make its way out of Labs into the main app
As @smetz mentioned this was built during Monzo Time. It’s one day per month where people at Monzo can pair with anyone in the company to work on something they think would add value, but would otherwise not be prioritised. Merging Payees was one of these things, and it took a few different “Monzo Times” to get it finished. There isn’t a team working on the Payments tab now (we’ve just recently redesigned it) so this was really the case of a few engineers going the extra mile to deliver something customers really wanted us to implement. That’s why there isn’t a plan to build this on iOS right now, but if this ends up being a feature widely used then it makes total sense for this to be prioritised within a team.
I wish Monzo time was spent finishing things that have already been started (IFTTT / API) rather than making more new things that may not get finished / lots of people can’t use
