I was listening to the new Starling Bank podcasts the other day
I loved the first three series and they enticed me in moving there before the community debacle. Jason is an excellent presenter
Listening to them, and going back to earlier episodes as well, I now notice something that bugs me a little and is somewhat on topic here
Even when pushed on it, none of the guests will ever admit that Starling ever made a mistake about anything, whether it was a choice of architecture five years ago or whatever, or that they’ve outgrown decisions
Not a criticism as such, just said by way of comparison and personal taste, but Monzo have been really rather open about mistakes made and early decisions that did not scale, and that feels more realistic
It was fixed in an hour AFAIK. There haven’t been any significant problems for ages… I think the last one I remember was when the entire mastercard network went down for a couple of hours last year.
Compared to the multi day outages from other big banks that they still haven’t told us much about, let alone obviously learned from (they’re still frantically outsourcing to save money, which was a big reason why it took so long to get the systems back online - they’d fired all the people who knew how to recover) monzo are looking really good right now. It’s not about whether you have issues… everyone does sometimes… it’s how you deal with that.
When the community was around, I regularly criticised Starling when their QA and testing processes failed. I don’t have unrealistic expectations and fully understand that bugs can and do creep in. It’s the completely avoidable, unnecessary issues that irk me.
Obviously with today’s Monzo issues we don’t know what the root cause was. I just find it a bit odd when people immediately jump to their defence. Businesses should be held to account when things go wrong, even those businesses you have a real affinity with.
how would you hold Monzo to account though , they have said they will let people know what went wrong , and presumably unless they are really foolish they will try to stop it happening again , do you withdraw all your money , close your account and move on to the next bank , until they have an outage or a problem with GPS that affects your account and then close that account because they don’t even tell you what happened apart from its all fixed now we will all soon run out of banks that dont have problems.
I’m no fanboy and if I don’t like their explanation I’ll be right there telling them that… but I’ll give them time to do their own post mortem and write an explanation first… too early for pitchforks.
All I’m saying is, it’s surprising how people are quick to immediately forgive any outage. That doesn’t happen in most industries. Even Apple, who arguably have some of the most ardent fans, get called out when they make a mistake or let their customers down.
Banks should be held to a higher standard than most companies. Even a web host will offer something like a 99.999% uptime guarantee, with SLAs to compensate customers when they fail to meet those standards.
Honestly, I’m not just knocking Monzo for the sake of it. I really don’t understand why people are seemingly OK with some of the recent issues. I bank with Starling and am certainly not OK when things go wrong. There have been many occasions in the past when an app update was released with a completely avoidable issue - I’m usually the first to criticise them for it.
Tom touched on this at the Investival. Monzo are actually pretty good compared to other banks in terms of outages - it’s just that most banks don’t bother telling anyone when things go down, so it’s hard to compare unless you can see the network.
I think it’d be useful in future if you quoted statements rather than making largely general comments about the community.
I don’t think it’s constructive to be so vague for others to guess who or what you’re talking about. I think it’d really help the conversation if you were a little more forthcoming with your comments.
Personally, I can’t see anyone defending Monzo at all. Only offering a balanced view, such as “let’s see what they say”.
I’d be interested to hear which comment is so blatantly a defence of Monzo? That way we can have a constructive conversation about it rather than create division.
Didn’t personally see any issues apart from the little message on the app to advise that customer service etc. was unavailable.
I liked that little touch.
Strange isn’t it , Ive banked with Lloyds for the last 25 years , last year between April and June alone they have had 19 ‘major outages’ where customers have been unable to access their money , did I notice it - no , did I hear about it at the time , - no , do I still use lloyds …yes - I haven’t held them to account I still use them.
Barclays had 18 major incidents
RBS 16 major incidents
and the debacle at TSB they ‘only’ had 7 major incidents
I guess the ‘transparency’ of apps like Starling and Monzo lets you know immediately when there are problems , whereas the major UK banks dont have this so called transparency and sometimes tend to ‘get away with it’.
And that’s not to say for some Monzo users it was probably a right pain in the A**e and not a great experience , and Im sure one that Monzo dont want customers to have.
Of course you can post however you like if it follows the guidelines.
I’d suggest you do quote a post you’re making a comment about though. I think it helps everyone follow the conversation and helps justify your point.
Otherwise, in my opinion, it just comes across as moaning and isn’t constructive or useful to anyone. And like I said, just creates division for what purpose?
I’d suggest not reading into the tone of the comment in future, as you’ll find my comment was only intended to help you and this conversation. I apologise if my comments came across as condescending, that’s not how I intended them.
If there’s an issue which might affect our customers, we use our Status Page to let them know what’s happening. We use the status page liberally, and often when an incident only affects a minority of our customers. We know this risks us being perceived as being less reliable than other banks, but we default to transparency (and it’s the right thing to do!)
When I had two transactions declined in quick succession I was told by Monzo on Twitter that they had no issues, now I’m reading it was a major outage! That’s hardly transparent.
