After reading the comments, what’s really concerning is how fickle society is. After a single negative piece on Monzo, people got scared and are ready to jump ship. Like I’ve always said, Monzo are the most transparent bank out there. If they could tell you why they block accounts, I’m sure they would. You should be scared of what the existing incumbents don’t tell you.
Sending someone on the show would have been an embarrassing pointless exercise. The presenter would have kept talking down to, and over the Monzo rep. It would have blown the situation out of proportion more than it already is.
Monzo responded in the best way possible, by posting a succinct and easy to digest post explaining why they block accounts - https://monzo.com/blog/2019/04/04/why-we-block-freeze-close-monzo-accounts/. Unfortunately, a lot of people probably didn’t even read it due to such short tweet-like attention spans.
Let’s get one thing straight. Watchdog is essentially a televised version of the Daily Mail. It was a clickbait style piece scaremongering people into staying with their existing laggard banks.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole thing was setup by somehow high up in the BBC who’s friends with someone high up in HSBC / Barclays / RBS etc.
371,000 SAR’s come from Banks (out of a total of 460,000)
This represents a 6% vs the previous year.
In each month, around 30,000 SARs are submitted.
They don’t list any specifics in here about timing to resolve, or outcome by sector, etc, so it’s hard to make any signifiant inference as to the effectiveness - but suffice to say there are A LOT of SARs floating around.
EDIT to add:
Now have found the 2015 report, which includes statistics on SAR’s with ‘consent requests refused’, here
The points from this are:
Total SARs at 381,000 up 8% from the previous year (354,000)
Banks account for 81% (318,000)
SAR consent refused (i.e. those that are held past the initial 7 days) = 9.4%, with 42% of those refused later accepted (i.e. those that are returned by the 40 day deadline).
So can assume that the growth is consistent YOY (around 8-10%), and the rejections and amount of SARs by banks are about the same too.
If it’s showing that 90% of SAR’s are effectively stopped, surely there is a problem in the reporting requirements and money laundering rules/flags, rather than an issue with specific banks?
Hmm, Natwest has 1.5k reviews with much higher customer number than Monzo, where Monzo has 4k reviews. Just read the positive ones, they are written by 18 year olds that like cool apps…
I have to say, that’s an amazingly poor attitude. Where’s your sense of empathy? “I’m all right Jack”?
It’s in the interest of every Monzo customer to know if Monzo are behaving poorly, or not, and as Monzo customers we should be interested in a resolution of some kind.
Just because it didn’t happen to you should be irrelevent.
I commented on their blog post a few weeks. Maybe I’m being naive but I’d rather see banks take their obligations seriously and fight against criminals laundering cash than ignore this stuff. If it results in my account being frozen as a false positive then fine. I have credit cards and access to funds elsewhere, it would be a pain but worth it.
