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

[Rika (Scarlet)]

@jzw95

Do you think alternate payment networks will gain traction (eg Pay By Bank, Curl)? If so, when, what sort of time frame?

I think we’ll see a much better way of paying for things by bank apps directly over the next 2–3 years with the new payment initiation requirements. I don’t know if they’ll gain much traction here but they seem to do extremely well in some European countries.

[Rika (Scarlet)]

@kennygrant

What would you most like to fix about the current system of payments?

I would love it if we could remove some of the more insecure interfaces on cards. I’d also like to make push payment scams much more difficult, if not impossible to pull off on Faster Payments. Currently, you have to send money to some anonymous numbers and you have near-zero protection if you mess up. It is often the cause of a lot of complaints against banks.

[Rika (Scarlet)]

@anon80080185

Is there anything you wish you had been told you when you began your career as an engineer?

Engineering requires people skills too and they’re often more important than your ability to write code.

@anon80080185

Also, are there any Go resources you would recommend to someone with prior programming experience looking to learn the language?

A Tour of Go is the only resource I used.

[Rika (Scarlet)]

@monzo2018

Can you give us any insight into current projects you are working on?

I’m currently working on wrapping up the onboarding of a new physical card manufacturer and am starting planning on what I’m going to do for the next few months.

It’s likely to be either 3D Secure 2.0 (EMV 3DS) or MDES for Merchants. Both of these should greatly improve the experience and security of shopping online (where the merchant supports them). MDES for Merchants in particular should reduce the need for virtual PANs by turning everything into tokens.

[Rika (Scarlet)]

@Takeaway_Addict

Favorite saying?

I don’t really have one.

[Rika (Scarlet)]

@davidwalton

brexit or bremain?

I’ve never seen the word bremain before but I’d very much like us to remain in the EU. From a financial services, travel, and customs perspective personally but also because most of my friends here are citizens of other EU members and are potentially very screwed over by brexit.

[Rika (Scarlet)]

@Peter_G

• do you have a smartwatch? Any preference on OS?

I’ve worn an Apple Watch every day almost since launch.

@Peter_G

• what’s the least known - or most esoteric - payment scheme you’ve come across?

It’s got to be CHAPS. Most people will only interact with CHAPS once in their life when buying a house and it normally involves banks literally phoning each other up before making a manual transfer. The fact that the website says lower-value payments like buying or paying a deposit on a property. should tell you everything you need to know.

@Peter_G

• 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?!”

Again, banks literally phoning each other up for CHAPS payments was a weird one to discover but discovering how Fractional-reserve banking works was a real trip. I’d like to stick to making money move.

@Peter_G

• why do you think 2019 will be the Year of Monzo?

I feel like we’ve reached the base coverage of almost everything that a regular person would need from a bank. From here, we can explore things you never thought your bank could do and really start building on the base we’ve created. Just over a year ago, we still had the majority of our customers on a prepaid card so we’ve come a long way in one year.

[LifeofRiley]

How much did you know of the banking sector before joining Monzo?

Was learning about it relatively easy or was is challenging?

Before learning about Go, did you know any other coding languages?

[Rika (Scarlet)]

@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?

We’re responsible for making sure that you can pay for things and get paid. This includes Mastercard, Bacs, Faster Payments, cash deposits, and so on. This includes both day to day operations, scheme management, and engineering.

Currently, we’re split in two squads, reliability and new schemes. One squad being a reactive while the other focusing on project work.

As of next week, we’ll be split differently. One squad covering transfers and cash deposits, the other handling everything to do with Mastercard or physical cards. I’ll be in the Mastercard team, of course.

@peter.reid

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?

We’re primarily a backend team. By the nature of needing to create internal tools, we do have some web front end experience but this is mainly within the existing frameworks of our Business Operations and Customer Support tools. We provide the platform for a product team to then build the user-facing functionality in the app.

[Rika (Scarlet)]

@neovo

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

I applied three times to various roles at Monzo a few years ago. Eventually hired as overnight customer support and worked my way up from there. No real drama, just didn’t make the cut the first few times. I think I eventually got hired because I’d spent nearly a whole year or two on this community answering questions back in the prepaid days.

[Rika (Scarlet)]

@Rat_au_van

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

@michaelw90

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

Can’t go into this one unfortunately. Sorry! We’d love to have done it sooner.

[Rat_au_van (Em)]

Didn’t think so, but always worth trying

[Rika (Scarlet)]

@Jackcrwhitney

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

I’ve asked myself this a bit as the company has rapidly grown. I’d love to work somewhere that isn’t a bank in the future and I get a lot of recruiters for very high places so who knows!

@Jackcrwhitney

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

Given the energy burn required to securely sustain a cryptocurrency, I don’t see much future in their current form.

@Jackcrwhitney

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

I’m not sure. I’d love it if we were one of the first to optionally support it though! It’s all technically ready other than apps/API constraints.

@Jackcrwhitney

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

Sure, this mainly consists of responding to new scheme and legal requirements that come up but also involves resolving and following up on any outages or incidents that occur (even if they’re not our own). Right now, my work is bringing on a new card manufacturer so that we always have at least two running so that problems don’t stop cards going out.

@Jackcrwhitney

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

I’ve answered this mainly already but overnight general customer operations customer operations technical specialist financial crime engineering (where we built 3D Secure) payments engineering.

[Rika (Scarlet)]

@tbowditch

Card signature strips - are they needed anymore? What’s your opinion on them?

Nope! Mastercard made signatures entirely pointless (by removing them from the chargeback/dispute rules) for almost all uses last year and are removing the requirement to have the strip on the card this year.

I’m honestly surprised they held on for this long.

[Rika (Scarlet)]

@LifeofRiley

How much did you know of the banking sector before joining Monzo?

Not very much! I learned everything I know about banking from Monzo in one way or another. Either here on the community in the very early days or by working on it now.

@LifeofRiley

Was learning about it relatively easy or was is challenging?

There is a lot of information to consume but for me, it was fairly easy. I feel like you have to be the kind of person who finds enjoyment in reading manuals to not go crazy.

@LifeofRiley

Before learning about Go, did you know any other coding languages?

Weirdly, x86 and PPC ASM, some C++, some JavaScript, some C#, some Objective-C, Swift, Bash scripting, and an embarrassing amount of Visual Basic.

I never really became too dependent on one single programming language. I used what I needed to get the job done. Because of this, Go was incredibly easy for me to pick up.

[Jackcrwhitney (Jack)]

Thanks for answering @Rika , insightful answers

[FinHorsley]

Does this mean there is no need to sign the back of the card? Or is this still something we should do.

[Rika (Scarlet)]

Both no need to sign the back of the card and no need for us to even print an area for a signature.

I expect it’ll be a while before all issuers remove it just due to how slowly these things roll out in the US in particular.

[craigy (Craig)]

I don’t think this one has been asked - are there any plans to move to the unembossed(?) cards? I think the monzo design would look awesome!

[Rika (Scarlet)]

No plans but we keep looking at it. Hugo has a good explanation of why we’re hesitant to do it right now.

Monzo investor card - design concept (By Brice Corbin)

Just to be clear, our current setup is 100% intentional. There are some easy-to-miss benefits in using good old OCR embossed type. One is to make the card camera-friendly (already commented before, maybe not that important of a reason anymore). It also makes instantly obvious what’s the front face of the card, which is important when you need the slot-in the card in an ATM or POS (even though some machines have now readers in both sides). Another one is that in some places (this happens abroad…