Monzo Staff Weekly Q&A - Rika Raybould (Payments Witch / Backend Engineer) 💰

[Takeaway_Addict]

Dangerous question lol

[Peter_G]

Rika! My favourite payments witch! Here are some questions:

• do you have a smartwatch? Any preference on OS?
• what’s the least known - or most esoteric - payment scheme you’ve come across?
• can you share any anecdotes around the way the finance industry operates that made you sit up and say “Seriously, that’s how it works?!”
• why do you think 2019 will be the Year of Monzo?

[peter.reid]

Interested to know what ‘scope’ the Payments team has? Backend for monzo.me? Payments over mastercard network? Internal transfers? What exactly do you folks cover?

Also are you a full-stack team? Do you do all the client work for the payments features? or are you purely a ‘backend’ tem?

[neovo]

Did I read somewhere you applied for multiple posts at Monzo? Tell us more

[Rat_au_van (Em)]

Full story of why it took so long to introduce Apple Pay, please

[michaelw90 (Michael)]

And why it accidentally got released too early so some of us () got early access?

[neovo]

This this this

[Jackcrwhitney (Jack)]

• If you had to leave monzo where else would you see yourself working? (or like to work).

• Thoughts on cryptocurrency and their place in the financial world in the future?

• Do you feel longer than 4 digit pins will take off in the uk?

• Are you able to tell us a bit more about your current work to improve payment system reliability?

• What was your path through monzo to your current role? I.E did you start off with a different role and progress.

[Rika (Scarlet)]

@Rat_au_van

How much do you like Post It notes?

I like them and use quite a few but please stop sending packs of them to the office. We can afford our own.

[kolok]

All my questions have been asked above, but thanks for your informative and great answers on the community.

[Rika (Scarlet)]

@BritishLibrary

• What ‘not very widely known but interesting to an insider’ info/factoid can you share about something to do with Payments?

I don’t think too many people are aware of just how much the payments industry is based on trust and risk management. Especially until recently with card payments across other banks, it was just sort of trusted that you would have the available balance to pay for what you bought when the money was eventually claimed. The penalty for not having enough balance was hefty unauthorised overdraft and declined payment fees.

Also declined payment fees are totally made up. It costs next to nothing to decline a card payment or return a Direct Debit unpaid. I don’t understand how some banks can justify charging money for it.

@BritishLibrary

• Do you have a favourite feature / code / engineer thing that you’ve worked on that hasn’t seen much airtime or public use, or generally that Us Users haven’t seen?

I made user numbers work on the current account back when we still had prepaid open. It’s the smallest feature that almost nobody notices now but it was severely missed when everybody had the user number of zero.

@BritishLibrary

• What was your career path to Monzo / Have you always been in Finance?

I went from hacking Japanese arcade music games and exploiting weaknesses in game consoles for fun alongside posting in this community into an overnight support job at Monzo. From there I quickly became a customer operations technical specialist. When that role was wound down after the full current account launch, I took the chance to move into engineering here.

There’s not too much interesting pre-Monzo history for me other than that.

@BritishLibrary

• I also feel like Rika Raybould would be the name of some form of superhero (got that Peter Parker alliteration factor to it…) … So… If you had to be bitten by something and get superpowers, what would you choose?

Mind control would be an interesting one. The human brain fascinates me and I feel like you could get a lot of milage out of a power like that.

[Rika (Scarlet)]

@michaelw90

Are we ever going to see drastic improvements to the merchant feedback system? If so, where do you see this heading & what’s the intended solution to help with scalability of it as a feature?

Despite me handling many of these requests, I’m really not the right person to ask about merchant feedback. Personally, I’d really like to see a team own it internally and give it the big overhaul it so desperately needs.

Ideally, we’d have a dedicated team who were given the tools to make big sweeping changes and fixes, including the writing of new enrichment rules. A vast majority of the things I can see in the queue could be fixed with some small automation.

[Rika (Scarlet)]

@joshpriceonline

What were you surprised by the most when you started working on the payments team and interacting with the MasterCard network etc?

How the rules are written such that the network can never lose money. This is true across all schemes but somebody (be it a merchant or bank/issuer) will always be responsible in the end for a dispute or issue. This often means that chargeback or dispute manuals are incredibly thick because they’ll cover every single combination of every possible edge case in every region. I constantly have to refer to the manuals because one byte in a message can make all the difference between a win or a loss.

[Rika (Scarlet)]

@RachelR

Favourite anime 2006 to 2013?

Haganai: I Don’t Have Many Friends, no question from that particular time period. I even stole my name from that show.

Ben-To probably comes a close second just for how insane it is. I’m almost certainly forgetting many others that could because the early 2010s were such a great time for anime in my opinion.

[Rika (Scarlet)]

@simonb

What are you looking forward to this year - work related or otherwise?

Moving into my own house and finally having my own place!

[Rika (Scarlet)]

@amelia

How much have you spent at CoCo Ichibanya since it opened in London?

£144.60. My love for Japanese curry is costly.

[Rika (Scarlet)]

@harryru

What is your favourite thing about working at Monzo (other than the people!)?

Our culture would be a bit of a weak answer so I’d say specifically just how much individuals are trusted. With information, with decisions, and with various other things like our remote work or sick day policy. As long as you’re meeting performance expectations and external deadlines, you don’t have middle managers helicoptering over you for every small task.

[Rika (Scarlet)]

@AlexM

What’s the biggest challenge that you’ve had to tackle in your time as a backend engineer?

Dealing with outside merchants and systems that give you very little feedback into what’s wrong.

We’ve spent far too many whole days comparing responses that work to those that don’t and trying to work out what exactly it is that something wants. Often we find out it’s something like the order that the elements of the request are in matters.

[Rika (Scarlet)]

@anon4562461

Do you like Domino’s potato wedges?

Sure, they’re pretty nice. One of the better wedges you can get at a major brand. I don’t often order them though on the basis that I’m probably going to have enough pizza to eat.

[Rika (Scarlet)]

@craigy

If you could add any feature to Monzo (ignoring any restrictions/limitations) what would you add?

Account aggregation and managed bills. I’d love to be able to outsource insurance/savings/bill management to Monzo to a point where it’s possible to manage everything through one great app. My biggest hate is having to call up any service provider for literally any reason and will do anything in my power to be able to do everything through an app/website.