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