Monzo mentioned on Rip Off Britain TV show, Tuesday

Item primarily concerned Revolut, but Monzo also got a mention, and not in a good way.

Discuss.

What was said?

In summary, suggesting digital banks have poor security, and poor access to support, especially emergency or crisis support. As I said the example shown was Revolut based, but Monzo got a specific mention, and impression given that Monzo were contacted by the BBC for a comment but they didn’t want to know.

Wonder what changed since last year?

It will be on the i-Player at some point. After an item about major problems with the charging infrastructure for electric cars, which was interesting in itself.

Apparently not a lot. :wink:

They segued from Revolut being less than helpful when one of their customers was a victim of a sophisticated phone scam, to a boiler plate statement from Monzo in response to non specific allegations that they closed or froze accounts too readily.

The overall thrust was that digital only banks have fairly rubbish customer service.

Was there any evidence as I don’t see this being an issue any more so than a legacy bank.

Fair point, although if this is based purely on the last week, then the Plus issue is likely skewing things? Not that this hasn’t been an issue for a while.

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To be honest, from both personal experience and anecdotal evidence on this forum, the support function is dreadful at the moment. The impression given is that any response, if you actually receive one, would be the same if the issue concerned ÂŁ1 as it would be for ÂŁ50K. Stock, impersonal responses are being given that do not take into account the urgency of a specific situation. As an investor it gives me no pleasure to say this, but I would like it to be highlighted and addressed.

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More staff are being hired to address those problems aren’t they? TheMonzo sign up rates has been astronomically high more customers more complaints

117K new users in the last 15 days.

Very impressive. But customer service areas need to scale to match and there lies the problem.

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Are they? What’s the timetable and prospective staff numbers?

‘More customers, more complaints’. And you’re quite happy with that, are you?

Didn’t say I was happy with more customers more complaints is a fact

Impressive but from that graph, also fairly predictable. So staffing levels in customer service can be planned for the coming months with fair accuracy.

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Ok. By the same token, people who are closing their accounts and leaving (and they are*) should mean less complaints. Good times. :wink:

  • To be fair, based on a sample of 3.

I’d be interested to see/hear exactly what was said. I don’t personally believe we freeze accounts any more than any other bank, and given that it’s the law, I’m not exactly sure what they expected us to say in a statement.

It kind of sounds like they just ran a piece on Revolut and just wanted to find a way to shoehorn another company into the piece to avoid accusations of bias. Having worked there myself, it’s surprisingly common.

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i-Player link

How far in?

The BBC do have a funny idea sometimes of what constitutes bias. “On today’s show we have a respected science sharing their findings, and a crackpot who disagrees with them”', so you’ll get a doctor and a homeopath, or a climate scientist and a climate change denier. :man_facepalming:

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Around 17:50.