Multiple people can't pay me

(Felix) #1

Hi,

I’ve been using Monzo for around a year with no issues. Over the past couple of months, I’ve found that at least five friends are unable to pay me. When they look at me on their contact lists, they can only invite me to join Monzo or send me their golden ticket. They can’t send me a payment. As far as I can tell, nothing about my account has changed - same phone number, email etc. Some things I’ve tried:

  • Turning ‘enable payments with friends’ on and off again repeatedly.
  • Reinstalling Monzo on my phone.
  • Checking all the app permissions on my phone.
  • Asking friends to delete me as a contact and then re-add me.
  • Making sure ‘enable payments’ is turned on on my friend’s phones.

Now I’m talking with the techy people on the live chat, but after two days they still haven’t been able to fix.

Would be grateful for any ideas.

F.

#2

Have you tried giving them your sort code and account number? That usually works

:stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

#3

Have you tried asking them to add you by your number in international (E.164) format as in +447... instead of 07...?

(Richard Cook) #4

Hey Felix, sorry you’re having trouble with receiving payments at the moment.

I’ll check in with the folks investigating this and see how they’re getting on.

Don’t worry, I’m sure we’ll have this sorted for you in no time.

(Richard Cook) #5

It looks like the team have got to the bottom of this, and it should be all good now. They’ll get back to you shortly!

If it’s still not working, let us know and we’ll keep investigating :mag_right:

(joekw) #6

I had this issue the other day. Got around it by going through the process to invite me and just not sending the message, then it let them pay me as normal.

(Naz) #7

Hi Felix :wave:

I’ve been investigating this in the shadows! :male_detective: We’ve been looking pretty deeply into the way our “contact discovery” works on the backend.

When a user adds their phone number to Monzo, we create a hash of it (turn it into a long string of numbers and letters) and store that in our systems, so that there’s never any plaintext phone numbers stored here at Monzo towers :european_castle:

When you visit the contacts tab on your app, it hashes the numbers in your phonebook and compares those hashes to the one’s on our system. If there’s a match, then the contact is payable :white_check_mark:

So why weren’t you coming up? It looks like that first step failed, due to the a rare case of a message not being properly processed in our contact discovery service. As a result, your number wasn’t able to be properly hashed.

All that was needed to fix the issue is to ‘update’ the phone number on our internal tools to the number that already exists, sending a new event through to our message queue and creating a new hash (now discoverable by all of your contacts’ devices).

We’re looking into to solving the root cause eventually by taking another look at the way we process messages on our backend, although that’s a decision that needs some careful consideration and could be a little way off unfortunately :see_no_evil: The good news is that we don’t process anything too critical here, so you’ll never be left without access to the app or unable to make transactions as a result of these sorts of messages not being properly processed.

I hope that makes some sort of sense! If anyone reading this has the same trouble, please do get in contact with us via the in-app chat and we’ll get it sorted for you :muscle:

Cheers!

(Dannii) #8

Great explanation…

Really appreciate you guys taking the time to explain the issue so we can all understand.

Love the community and being able to bank with real people rather than just machines.