More card controls / freeze functionality

Go to a basic bank then.

So I was looking through my Halifax app earlier and noticed the freeze card section.

You’re able to freeze your card in different ways as seen below which I thought was a really good idea!

It would be a great way of restricting the cards use in a variety of different situations.

Maybe monzo could implement something like this?

This has been suggested before. You can vote for it in the below topic.

Those are some weirdly specific and niche toggles. :thinking: Not entirely sure of the use case for freezing abroad?

I have to admit I don’t really see the point in limiting the use of your card this way? I mean I guess the online one but then are you really going to toggle it on and off when you want to buy something online?

Imagine you needed cash but you had no internet so you couldn’t withdraw any. :no_mouth:

The missing one, freezing contactless use, send to be the most obvious one that makes some sense.

Although I’m pretty sure I’ve read people on here freezing their cards and unfreezing them to pay constantly. :man_shrugging:

Possibly for the niche case where you travel abroad but don’t intend to use that particular card even though you have it with you? Considered it for ‘well, it would be nice to be extra safe if I know I’ll never travel abroad’, but in the event your card goes missing in that circumstace, one would expect (hope?) that the card owners would notice the card is missing before it has left the country and been used abroad.

I don’t think it’s straightforward to freeze contactless, though, given offline contactless exists. The only real way of ‘freezing’ contactless would be to break the aerial in the card.

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A few cases I could think of:

  • once in a blue moon do I withdraw cash. So if someone does skim your card and get your pin, they could withdraw 2 daily limits at midnight, easy.

  • I’ve had it a couple of times in the past after returning from holiday, someone had cloned my card and used it. So an overseas block would work in that instance.

I’m sure there’s many use cases that people would feel more secure against card fraud.

I know if these were reported as fraud, you would almost certainly get your money back. But I’d rather not let the thieves get any money whatsoever.

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Starting offer similar, but call it “locking”

I lock my card, for all or various uses, when not intending to use it. My Starling account is for a specific purpose, so not used often.

Monzo is m main, daily, account, so it would be unlikely that I would use any similar feature to the same extent with Monzo.

The more granular, the better.

I discovered I had locked my Starling card for ATM use when I was in a rush the other day and was frustrated the first time it was rejected.

I toggled the ATM switch, but the cashpoint still refused the transaction a couple more times. I finally worked out I needed to unlock ‘card present transactions’ as well.

Now everything (except gambling and magstripe) remains unlocked.

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Ditto!

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This is exactly why “the more toggles the better” is often wrong. The more options, the more chance for confusion and inconvenience. Options should be carefully thought about before being introduced. Good design results in the minimum number of options and good defaults for everything else.

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But toggles enable you to experience the app the way you want it to. Look at the myriad of toggles in a phones settings. Everyone has different ways they want their device to behave.

As long as access and descriptions of them toggles are well designed, then everyone is happy.

And bugs. Monzo staff have given this as a reason for not increasing complexity in the past.

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That’s not what behavioural research shows. At a certain point, more choice leads to more stress and less ‘happiness’. Some choice and customisation is definitely necessary. But the ‘throw in as many options as you can’ does not lead to a good experience except for a very small minority.

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I would’ve accepted ‘granular is better’ before, but having experienced the panic of not being able to withdraw cash (I was dashing to the only available slot at the only available solicitor who was open during the pandemic, for urgent document verification which required cash) it took me until the fifth attempt before I realised that the machine was probably reading the chip on the card and I should try enabling ‘card present’ transactions. When I’d calmed down, the block made sense, but it took four attempts just to try unlocking everything.

Starling’s attempt to be granular (and my interpretation of its usage) had unintended consequences in the real world outside of Starling’s control, but which reflected badly on it.

Interestingly, I’ve always backed Monzo’s denial of toggles, and now it has been demonstrated why many toggles can interact in unintended ways.

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Agreed (my war on toggles refers).

But I think Monzo does need to balance against the opposite problem where they don’t innovate because they can’t see the user need. Arguably no one needed to freeze their card but now it’s commonplace, together with more sophisticated controls. Monzo needs to balance advanced controls and usability carefully, in my view. Some nuance between the two extremes will be needed.

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Ultimately that’s just the way starling implemented it, with confusing functions that aren’t very well explained.

Just because starling haven’t done it well and the consequence of that is your experience, doesn’t mean it can’t be done better / properly.

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I would normally agree with you, but I also think it’s possible to give the user a greater degree of control (to an extent) without sacrificing convenience and order, so long as you get the interface right and avoid being verbose. Good design is about order, not the absence of complexity.

… within reason :smirk:

I was a bit cavalier there, I think.

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You may be right, but it’s beyond my level of layperson’s banking knowledge.