I have a payment acceptance issue: a council is not accepting my Monzo or Starling sort codes (but does accept Halifax and others).
This is a story of two types of responses:
Monzo - “we have a specialist team, they’ll contact the council to deal with it”
Starling - “there’s no problem with your account so sorry you need to contact the council since it’s an error on their end” (even though I explained that the council doesn’t accept phone calls)
Monzo contacting them will probably trigger them to update their records and Starling will get included and so get away with this rather unhelpful response
And then someone will be along to sing their praises
The merry dance we all lead!
And (rather unusually) Monzo responded in real time, so it was a live chat.
I’m testing out Starling and so far, Monzo is beating them on everything.
As I’ve alluded to in other threads, there isn’t an objective ’best’ bank. There is just a bank that’s better in certain limited and specific (sorry, had to get that phrase out of my system today) circumstances.
To take the case in point, while Monzo have performed better than Starling here, a ‘better’ bank would be one whose sort code is more universally accepted.
I laughed when reading this. Wait until you have a bigger or more complex issue and are waiting days for Monzo to help you. You can’t call as they tell you to go the chat and hang up, and you get passed around like a cheap w***e by the so called specialists.
It seems flag happy do goers aren’t able to read the truth.
I mean I’ve had 3 years of complex issues with Monzo, and while they sometimes annoy me, I’m still here, so 
Absolutely. And there’s a “best” bank based on my use cases. For me, that’s probably between First Direct, Monzo and Starling. I had FD for 10 years, Monzo for 3 years and I’m giving Starling a chance (although I’m just testing them on a few issues, not moving there).
My council tried to refuse my Monzo card as well. I told them that I paid with Monzo before.
Lady confirmed her system shows an error message but she was able to set up Direct Debit.
Contacted Monzo about issue no help at all.
Starling was accepted without any issues
So the council staff manually set up the DD successfully but you still contacted Monzo and they were no help? What help did you need at that point?
To help others not hit the acceptance issue in the future perhaps?
Yeah totally. But then why say they were no help at all? Like - what were they expecting?
Wonder what happens to the DD when someone CASSes to Starling on Monzo in this scenario. Does it just fail? With the guarantees built into both the Switch service and the DD system, I imagine it would go fine. But who knows?
I hate all this “Computer says no” crap.
I worked on processing DDs for BT 22 years ago and way back then whenever a situation arose like this we would just manually override the system. We had an actual printed book of UK sortcodes and also internal memos with codes for more “obscure” banks like Bank Of Cyprus or Coutts & Co. Basically anything that the average joe might not have heard of we’d have some way of processing the mandate without the need for the customer to start jumping through hoops and having to contact their bank.
This thread shouldnt be about Bank vs Bank, it should be about how crap the council is in the year 2020
And how there’s no way to phone the council. I have literally filled in a paper DD mandate and posted it.
Although to be fair to them, they’ve had their budget cut by 97% since 2010. I’m surprised there is still a council at this point tbh.
Off topic , but , thats one hell of a cut …which council has had a 97% cut to their budget since 2010 ?
It’s the government grant that was cut 97% (that’s their main source of funding), and it was since 2013, not 2010.
That’s not an unusually high amount. Other councils have suffered similar cuts.
The pop up with starting annoys me
The Facebook messenger style thing
That’s because that grant is being phased out to be replaced with other sources.
For instance, in future local authorities will keep 75% of local business rates rather than 50% as they did before.
How much of the government grant will that typically replace?
not that we are on topic anymore …but …
https://www.ifs.org.uk/uploads/publications/comms/R121.pdf#page=6