Monzo Labs: Pay anyone by text or email

I’ve just made the following change for the next release: tap-hold to copy. What do you think?

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I’m working on this today :+1:

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Thanks for the feedback. I’ve also sent a code to google the same way so it’s definitely a pain! We will address this before launch, as well as being able to cancel. For now if you haven’t shared the link yet then you could just dismiss the feed item for the “Pending” payment and forget about it. If you have shared it and want to cancel it, unfortunately you’ll need to contact customer support :frowning: We will fix this in January.

As for showing the link; we will do this at some point, but for security we are probably going to add it behind a second PIN / fingerprint authentication, and it will generate a new code for the payment.

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Interesting thread, and good comms, @james & @robinb :grinning:

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I just used this feature for the first time to pay a colleague back (I’m cashless which is difficult in an office where people buy each other food a lot, but this solves the problem for me which is amazing).

I looked at the page generated by the link, and I’ve gotta say I agree with others on this thread that it feels the wrong way around, the buttons should be switched.

However, saying that, I sent this person the link and they very quickly accepted the money into their account, no questions asked. So whilst I personally feel from a UX perspective it’s the wrong way around at the moment, an actual user seemed to have no issues with it. I should probably add, they also didn’t sign up to monzo, as it was a ‘quick, pay me for this sausage sarnie that im about to go and fetch for you’ kinda thing and I can’t really see why anyone would take the time to sign up in this kind of scenario.

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Little sneak peek of the WIP cancel flow from our awesome designer :eyes:

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They do find their way reasonably quickly because there’s limited options, but this is a human interface problem. When the page opens pretty much everyone without thinking about it will immediately recognise and see within a second the big blue “button” as exactly that. There’s one button, i need to press that next. It all happens without you really thinking about it at all.

So this is a purposeful decision, when you want to make things easy, you make it flow easily by making things recognisable and simple. a button is a button, you push those. there’s only one, so you know within a second of the page loading where you need to go next.

Its only when you start reading the text and actively start looking at the page that you see whats wrong with it. Most people will see the pay with a non monzo account link. But the page is designed, deliberately, to push you toward the blue button.

This is why i said in one post that its arguably unethical. over dramatic? maybe in this day and age, but that’s still arguable unethical, even if its just a tiny bit unethical.

you can get there in the end fine, but that doesn’t change the fact that it appears at least from an outside perspective that the page was made not from a customer point of view, but from a business “we need to get more people” point of view as its primary function. And is why i find it pretty disappointing.

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That’s ace. Really clear :+1:

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I like it.

I’d guess this would reflect in the link when they try to go to it e.g. it would say the payment was cancelled?

Thanks, I wanted to re-assure that we are hearing all sides of the feedback on this. I’m making changes to how the page looks today and will share something soon!

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OK my feedback. I had the perfect use case today; needed to ‘put in’ a score for a leaving present, so the collector put it in for me and I was paying her back. I made the assumption she has probably never heard of :monzo: Monzo, and wouldn’t have seen this kind of facility before, though she may be familiar with PayPal.

Firstly, having kept up with the discussion here I went back and examined what would actually be displayed to the recipient.

I was pleased to see that reading down the page, after the initial yellow ‘bonus’ of an extra tenner, the option to deposit to a current bank account is described first, with the option to open a Monzo account as the alternative. The wording is clear:

We can either put your money in an account of your choice, or you can sign up to Monzo in 5 minutes.

I’d say that was fair, and that if I received this, I’d feel the Monzo option is no more prioritised over the existing account option, even with the different button colours. Both option buttons seem clearly and equally laid out to me. Yes, I understand that Monzo is taking the opportunity to market itself, but I don’t see any “dark patterns” or whatever. To me, it doesn’t seem pushy, or underhanded (and I’m as sceptical as they come regarding marketing, and you’ll see from my posting history, not an out–and–out Monzo KoolAid drinker!)

So I set up the link.

It’s a bit disconcerting choosing ‘text message’ and then changing my mind (when I saw my recipient wouldn’t receive this as an iMessage but rather as a traditional SMS, which I though might make the link look a little spammy) that upon cancelling the name input into the message, the flow upon returning to Monzo appeared to suggest the link had been sent somewhere. I had to go into my messages to double check.

Of course, then I had to set up another link, and chose WhatsApp. This flow worked better as I actually saw the link send (and be received with the two ticks) but, of course, then I had two links sitting in my feed, both unclickable.

I understand this will all be beautified, and links made cancellable and viewable when the feature is iterated upon, so all fine for now.

A few minutes later there was a cash till notification and my second feed item had converted to a Faster Payment.

The recipient came back to me with a ”It’s worked… I think!!” which I took to be a success (as there didn’t seem to be any confusion).

Just one thing though: Please can there be an explicit instruction to for the recipient to DOUBLE CHECK their bank details? It occurred to me that things might get awkward if they entered a typo and the money went to a stranger; especially on my part – I might have to explain that I wasn’t going to send more money, but I’d also probably have to flag it up to Customer Services, and as we all know, it’s virtually impossible to get back money sent to the wrong account, so that would be a loss to me, because of my recipient’s mistake. This creates an unusual precedent of fault which doesn’t really exist at the moment (though I guess it’s the same as them putting a typo into a message to me with their bank details) but I still think I’d prefer the risk to be spelled out at the page where they input their account number and sort code.

Anyway, I think this is a nice little feature. I’m sure High Street banks have been trying to figure out for years how to promote themselves in the ‘pay someone’ process so this feels innovative. I’m especially happy that my recipient now appears in my Payments tab, so they need not be bothered by another marketing attempt again. This answers my previous reservations on the need for such a feature, so well done, nice integration.

I’d use again, and look forward to the background usability work being completed.

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Thank you. Look forward to seeing the improvements! :slight_smile:

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Thanks for the super detailed write-up and real-world example :slight_smile:

For now you should be able to dismiss the “pending” feed item from the link you didn’t send as a workaround.

I really like your suggestion on pushing people to double check bank details, as this will probably go wrong some percentage of the time!

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Awesome. :slight_smile:

Personally I’ve always found prewritten share messages bizarre. Does anyone not delete everything but the link every time? Or are others happy to sound overly enthusiastic and entirely unlike themselves.

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I delete it with the things that add prefilled text. It does sounds weird, i don’t think anyone has ever got it right. :smile:

Does iOS still say “card balance”? Android has “balance now” which is a little more accurate (and helps step away from ‘Monzo as a card’ mindset).

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I think I’d want the consequences explicitly spelled out to my intended recipient that it’s ON THEM, (and the money will still transfer immediately) if they mess up putting in their own bank details.

And I’d be interested in some stats after a few months about what percentage of people mess that up :wink: It’s going to make for some interesting conversations if the recipient still has the thing being paid for!

I also forgot to say: My payment reference was “Sam leaving present” which copied through OK on the screenshot I was sent back by the recipient (all intrigued by the new feature, I should add, though not, it seemed, intrigued enough to open a Monzo account :rofl:)

This reference has been truncated to “Sam leaving presen” in my feed. Could this be a character limit from the receiving bank – 08-90-29 – or the system as a whole? If so, maybe a character limit on the set–up page is in order?

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Unfortunately it’s a limitation of “faster payments” in the UK, the reference will be truncated. We didn’t want to add a hard cap when sending the money because:
a) You see the full thing (with possible emoji!) on the web
b) The full reference would make it through if the recipient signed up to monzo to receive the payment

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Nah, I think the design template is just a little out of date. Will pass this on, thanks! :hot_coral_heart:

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It says “Account Balance” on my screen.

I remember much discussion some months ago about standardising the terms on both OSs but it looks like that’s dropped off the radar for the moment (and I can’t remember what terms were favoured anyway).

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