Moved from the UK to US a few months back and have recently just shut down my UK Monzo account to open a US one.
Hopefully I am missing something here and someone can point me in the right direction.
It seems that transfers into the Monzo US account are one way and there is no way to transfer money out of Monzo to another bank account.
Transfer Money In:
I can provide the Monzo US Routing and Account numbers to my other bank and then transfer money across. Or I can use a debit card linked to my other account to top up my Monzo account.
Transfer Money Out
Under the Payments tab, after selecting “Pay someone” I can only see the options for “Pay someone nearby” or “Invite Contacts to Monzo” as seen in the below screenshot.
The other option I have found is, selecting the “Move money” options from the 3 dots menu on the Monzo Account card.
As seen below this gives me the option to add a linked account - I don’t want to Link the account, I don’t need the balance from my other account in the Monzo app, I just need to transfer money to another bank account.
Even if I wanted to Link the account, not all US banks, including mine support the Plaid service that is used so its technically impossible for me to add the account this way.
Banking in the US is much more complex compared to the UK, and there isn’t any real standard (as far as i’m aware) for transferring money between different institutions. This is why you hear a lot of “Venmo/CashApp/PayPal me” as it’s more convenient to use those apps in the US.
This could explain why the feature is missing from the Monzo app for US accounts. Speaking as a UK customer.
That’s not the whole story. While there are many competing “over the top” providers that are quite popular and used to facilitate easy and quick transfers, such as Zelle and PayPal, the US also does have the standard of ACH payments which all banks should theoretically support.
I imagine that the OP is basically wanting to initiate an ACH payment here and wondering how to do it. I’m not a US Monzo customer myself either, but I would be surprised if they don’t offer the feature at all.
The “problem” with ACH payments is that they are not as quick as Faster Payments in the UK, which is another reason why people use alternatives.
It’s not Open Banking as that’s APIs to view transactions etc in other apps, it’s just differences in the banking system over there as mentioned above. It’s not standard to just be able to make a bank transfer to any bank account like we can, I work with Americans and they’ve been surprised how easy it is for us over here.
(Edit: might be the equivalent of open banking for the external account bit, but not for sending a payment in general)
In the US they also still take your card away with them in restaurants and swipe it with the magstripe, compared to here where the card stays with the customer and it’s chip & pin or contactless, so it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that they’re behind in other areas
Not ideal but if your institution doesn’t support plaid why don’t you just add you just pull the money from your other bank. You should be able to add the Monzo routing number and initiate a transfer from that end.
