Monzo so far

Hi all! Today is my 18th birthday and so as a result, I was finally able to sign up for a Monzo account. I thought I’d share my experience so far along with my observations going through the onboarding process.

Before I go any further, I just wanted to say that I really love the look of Monzo. I’ve heard great things about it from friends and I fully trust the team behind it. Any issues below are described to help make Monzo better and saying that I found a problem does not mean that I think less of Monzo because of it.

Without further ado:

I began by trying to sign up on Android, a few minutes after midnight. The app told me that I needed to be 18 to sign up, and after some fiddling, I realised that in reality, the Android app requires you to be at least 18 years and one day.

Moving forward, I installed the Monzo app on my iPod. I was able to signup there and the whole process went swimmingly until… I was put into some strange queue state. Each time I opened/refreshed the app, the screen went red and I was given an error stating that I was still in the waiting list and was not a prepaid user. Once this vanished, I was told that 0 users were ahead of me.

I then decided to try and look on my Android device, but as I had previously opted to sign up, I couldn’t go back from the “Account Details” registration screen. This seemed to show up on app launch even after clearing the app’s data and cache, which I found unusual. Uninstalling the app however allowed me to sign in to an existing account and with that I received the magic link. Once the app opened, I was presented with a screen telling me that Monzo would soon be coming to the United Kingdom and that I’d be told as soon as this happened! Very peculiar!

At this stage, I have to give an enormous thanks to the team at Monzo. They replied to my Facebook message at 44 minutes past midnight, asking me to check the app again, and I was ready to get started when I did. Signing up was a breeze, identity verification worked first time, and I now have a card on its way which I am very excited for.

I’ll keep you all updated with feedback when I get my card and begin using Monzo more regularly. Due to the great customer support and brilliant feature set, I actually plan on going #FullMonzo pretty quickly. I may have struggled to sign up but I was certainly determined to do so - and I think I made the right decision.

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Happy Birthday :birthday:

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Thanks for posting your experience, @oliverdunk :heart:

Glad to have you on board!

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Thanks :heart: This post is more about Monzo than my birthday, but I did enjoy my cake made out of doughnuts!

44

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No problem Simon, thanks for building such a great bank! If these aren’t known issues and they would be better filed somewhere else, do let me know.

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I may be over thinking here, or could be bang on, so either way I’m gonna say it. This could be because the app uses GMT for transaction data currently. When you open the app at 00:35 you will see your ‘today’ spend is actually yesterday’s.

Not sure if any Monzo staff could confirm this, but just a quick thought that I had.

Lastly, welcome to the party dude! I hope you enjoy the ride as much as I have so far :tada: :cake: :gift:

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I think overdraft charges also apply at 1am as well right now

Can confirm, we calculate this and many other date boundaries on UTC to avoid issues with time zone changes. It’s not a 100% ideal solution (especially with Spent Today while abroad) but it does avoid whole classes of bugs until we’re ready to tackle the issue properly. :+1:

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Welcome to Monzo hope you have a great experience…
Happy Birthday

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Hey Rika, thanks for following up on that.

I could be wrong but it feels like there is some client side validation too? I had been fiddling the day before and while I never hit continue, I could see that even many hours into the day I was told I was too young. Maybe the setup of these is different on the Android app to the iOS one?

Update time! I was incredibly impressed to see my card posted through the letter box this morning, just over 24 hours after I signed up. Sadly, tapping it against the back of my Pixel 2 XL didn’t work, but the manual activation was just as easy.

There was a strange issue where I didn’t have a monzo.me link and couldn’t find anywhere to set one up, but support were able to fix that for me within a matter of minutes, even over the weekend. I think the issue was likely related to the one I was having above.

Once my account was setup I transferred £20 over by bank transfer. With this, I was able to enter tonight’s lottery, and purchase some dog treats at Pets at Home. Sadly I didn’t win the lottery, but the dog emoji on the second notification did make me smile!

So, to summarise my Monzo experience has been a great one so far. I’m going to play around for a month or so, and then I think #FullMonzo is something I’d be happy to move towards. I’ll need to keep my old account open for SWIFT payments, but other than that, I don’t think I’ll be needing Lloyds.

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Out of curiosity, did it give an error or did it just not read at all? I’ve found the NFC reader on the 2XL to be require very precise placement to read an NFC chip…

Liam

No error! I tried quite hard to find the sweet spot but couldn’t - willing to accept that it could’ve been my phone’s problem rather than Monzo’s, though.