They’re a private company. The valuation means practically nothing and has no real life bearing on their potential share price.
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They could also say how many accounts are frozen and how that compares to other banks. They could say how many false positives they have and what they are doing to reduce the number.
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Is information on number of accounts across all banks known? Agree on second point, but having watched Watchdog in the past, I’m not sure they’d get to those nuances.
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For a start it sounds like the rules around telling the customer what is going on need to be relaxed. I understand they may not be able to tell them specifics but there must be certain info they can be told without compromising an investigation, where you are in the process and has an extension been requested seem like things you could tell them.
I’m not a regular viewer, but I’ve seen executives from companies give a good account on the programme. I think it’s right that the programme holds these people to account when things go wrong.
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There is an article with a comment from Monzo that I believe hasn’t been shared before? Plus if someone doesn’t want to watch the watchdog you can read pretty much all that was said there.
The problem with this, is that if an account holder is a money launderer under investigation, they may set about destroying evidence or moving funds.
Absolutely, the rules around AML are quite Draconian as they were drafted shortly after 9/11 and seem to be designed only with thought towards the criminals being caught, not the innocent people caught up.
For instance, any professional criminal is going to know what the deal is when their account is frozen, withholding information only hurts innocent victims, not the criminals.
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How? Their account is frozen. Any criminal will know how the system works and know they’ve been rumbled when the account gets frozen anyway, it’s only innocent parties who need this information.
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Yes, all Monzo had to do was send someone on the show and stress that they take the law seriously, and promise to look into improving the speed of their customer response.
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I suspect that Monzo are opening accounts at a faster rate than other banks, so even if the proportion of false positives were the same as other banks, it would make sense that they’d freeze more accounts - assuming recently-opened accounts were more likely to be frozen than those that had a longer history.
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Which is precisely why Monzo should have released a statement or had someone on the show to counter the one sided programme…
The problem is that they can’t promise this. They need to spend time investigating things. Pretty sure someone earlier in this thread say the NCA can ask for assets to be frozen for up to 6 months(!) while an investigation happens - this is outside of their control and outright lying to customers would look even worse.
On the other hand, Monzo are much smaller than traditional banks, so the perceived problem should be much smaller, even if the false positive rate is a bit higher for the reasons you give.
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Surely they would do this the moment the account is frozen?
Money laundering typically involves several accounts in different names, hence why investigations take a long time. Related accounts may not be frozen yet.
Also, you’d only know an account is frozen when a transaction failed. If you are not using Monzo for your everyday banking, you might not notice for a while.
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I wonder if these innocent people have been victims of identity fraud and the NCA are investigating if they are the legit person or the fraudster.
Sure, so tell people what’s going on as soon as they ask and not proactively then. Doesn’t change the fact that there’s an information asymmetry where the information Monzo are withholding is likely already known thoroughly by the criminal and so the law only hurts the victims.
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I would think so, there’s a couple on social media that also report that they had similar issues with other challenger banks like Starling or Revolut. It can’t be a coincidence that this happens to people across multiple banks.