My complaint with Monzo

Monzo Chat
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Hello all :wave:

Sorry I’ve been a bit missing. I’ve spent most of the week battling with a few Customer Advocacy members at Monzo and I can’t lie, it’s been a very frustrating process.

On Friday, Nov 1st I required my limits raising to pay my mortgage after receiving an early inheritance, my new deal was specifically set up with this overpayment in mind, had it not been made in time my mortgage would have doubled its monthly payment, leaving it unaffordable and potentially catastrophic circumstances for my family.

I awoke bright and early Friday morning and pinged the required details to Monzo. I had actually done this both one week and one month ago (exactly!) stressing the importance of this transaction to Monzo and attempting to adjust limits in advance, only to be told “no” and reassured this procedure was straight-forward and would sail through.

It took 1 hour or so for Monzo to respond and escalate to a specialist. All going well.

The next three hours were absolute radio silence and the magnitude and importance of this payment was weighing hard on me. I’ll admit to having kittens when I saw transfers were due to be down on Saturday. (My flex day, if I couldn’t make the payment on Friday.)

However around 1pm Monzo came through and the transfer went out and was received without a hitch. Phew!

Afterwards, I fed back to the team that I found the process quite taxing and offered up some suggestions on how to improve. Primarily the ability raise limits in advance.

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Monzo offered me £15 and gave me a bit of lip service that the team had been following their own guidelines properly.

I declined the £15 as I really don’t see why I should receive money and asked for a final response regarding the raising limit issue in the hope that it might see a different, less resistant to change, set of eyes.

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Today I had £30 deposit placed in my account (wtf) and another letter saying that the wait I experienced was unacceptable (I never complained about that?), but essentially reiterating that the processes Monzo followed are as per their internal guidelines.

I’ve replied to say that I don’t want the money and I’m more interested in helping change the procedure. Unfortunately Monzo’s replies resemble an earlier statement.

I’ve found this feedback procedure pretty frustrating to be honest, so spent some time cooling down and straightening out my head.

Today, I chose to write to Tom on Twitter in the hope that something can happen. I’m well aware that I look totally pig headed, but I just don’t like this procedure and the lack of a decent response (and papering over the cracks with the unwarranted £30) is just so alien to me. Especially from Monzo who have always seemed so receptive to change for the better.

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Apologies for the mind dump. This has been a very frustrating period for me with Monzo, this problem seems too easy to resolve, even my legacy bank can do it.

A final screenshot after I reiterated to Monzo that I wanted policy change not compensation elicited this response…

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Thoughts?

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My biggest issue with Monzo is throwing money at people

Either acknowledge it’s an issue and fix it or say that it works as intended and don’t

Money doesn’t solve everything

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Yes, the unwarranted money is a bit strange, but also a common practice in almost every industry - who doesn’t feel better after a “good will gesture”? I think it doesn’t work when the money is clearly not accompanied with an understanding of the rationale behind the feedback in the first place.

For example, if the COp/customer advocate had said “yes, you are right, we are looking into ways to organise this in advance, we are sorry we haven’t been able to do so for you yet and are sorry for the undue stress. Please accept £15/30 as a token of our blah blah,” we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation…

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It seems like Monzo saying sorry for almost everything (including things that weren’t their fault), has evolved into Monzo saying sorry and giving compensation for almost everything instead.

Perhaps this makes sense because it improves retention & / or decreases reputational damage by reducing complaints, enough to offset the cost. Or there’s some other benefit to the business that I’m not seeing.

But the rate of people being offered compensation, looks quite strange from the outside. Especially as it seems to be regularly being offered when the issue they encountered had little / no impact on them. I’ve seen more extreme examples like that (in terms of non-issues), than the one that Codf has shared here.

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I literally had the same experience and situation. I was offered money but the same thing happened to me a month earlier!

Really hoping they can address the issue.

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I guess my question would be, if you feel the process would work if you had a level of confidence that the wait time between making the enquiry, getting the response from the specialist, and then having the raise applied on the same day was say, less than an hour? Or even the first hour, which you mention as being fine, for the escalation, and then say, another hour for the escalation to be handled?

It’s tough for me to comment on whether or not the procedure ought to be changed because I don’t have the knowledge of why the procedure was designed that way in the first place, but I would imagine there’s a valid reason why it was designed that way and if we start from that as a first principle, then essentially the nature of your frustration is the wait time, and it’s not incorrect for us to say that the correct procedures were followed.

Unfortunately at this stage in the game questions around why a specific procedure or policy has been designed/implemented in any given way will often require a deeper level of knowledge than COps would be required to know - and the complaint process, too, will look at whether the procedures, as they exist, were correctly followed or not.

My understanding is that the question you are therefore looking to be answered is around the justifications (whatever they might be) for us not allowing limit raises prior to the day the higher limit payment needs to be made. I’m a little swamped right now, but I will do my best to try and find the person who is best placed to get this question answered or shed a little light on this for you :slight_smile:

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Thanks Simon. Appreciated.

Hopefully you and @tom meet in that room Monday morning… :crossed_fingers::sweat_smile:

My answer to this is no.

Customers in this position should not be beholden to the volatility of Monzo CS wait times. I would argue that this falls under failing to acknowledge the magnitude and importance of these payments to the customer. It should have its own designated, in-advance system.

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To throw an actual proposed solution into the mix, and stimulate some thought into how it might be tackled, I think I’d be pretty comfortable with being able to:

(a) specify the bank transfer details, along with the exact transfer amount, in advance and have this approved by someone; or

(b) as above, but essentially have it set as a scheduled transaction that goes out a midday and I can cancel right up until that moment; or

(c) if it’s going to be a card transaction, specify the exact date and amount to be approved in advance, and then have some way in-app of “approving this for the next 15/30/45/60 minutes” (to stop leaving my card open to a transaction of obscene amounts for 24 hours).

Those checks could just become the final part of the payment approval pipeline after passing AML checks etc.

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I’d be happy with all of those solutions.

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Ironically, the best CS I had with Monzo was for a situation identical to yours, but I used the phone service and it took a matter of minutes.

Although my experience seems to be the exception rather than the rule, and I agree with you, that as it stands, it’s not a pleasant experience because of the slow CS times.

There really is no obvious reason I can think of about why this policy is in place. To me, it feels more like one of those niche scenarios that Monzo haven’t put as much time into, so it’s still a sub par process that doesn’t fit in with Monzo’s “cutting edge” ease of banking.

You should be able to get all of this sorted days/weeks before the payment date, and it should be a weight off your mind in the lead up to whatever event it is you need to pay for, rather than yet another thing to worry about.

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I also received £30 for a complete non-complaint. I’m not sure what to do with the money as I didn’t request it and certainly don’t feel like I deserve it!

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Hey, Monzo. I’m not complaining.

Looking forward to free money.

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I agree with you,

I had to get my limits raised earlier in the year and although cops sorted it within about 30 mins, I did find it slightly odd that it couldn’t be done before hand (I’d dropped them a message to find out.)

It’s difficult to guarantee cops will get this sorted within a current timeframe especially with how things are at current.

I know this is a long shot but to me it feels like Monzo are being too conservative in a similar way to what they are with rolling out loans and overdrafts. They just aren’t ready to accept the risk of longer / advanced increases.

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I had cash deposited by Monzo.

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I was waiting over a period of three/four weeks for chat to comeback to me.

I had wrote the word ‘complaint’ by itself to test if that was picked up as a keyword automatically. It’s not, as it was another few days before I got another reply to say it had been escalated into a complaint. :man_facepalming:

This then resulted in cash being given and an email to say we’re sorry.

However they still didn’t actually bother to reply so assume it was a case of chuck cash at it to make it go away.

I’ve currently got a chat open about Curve and why the card is increasingly being frozen. It was 25 October when I started this chat, I’ve given up expecting a reply.

I’m wondering why I bother posting in forums too.

Whist a good amount is whining there’s hopefully also good amount of positive criticism and ideas.

It feels though like I’m talking to a brick wall thought and those contributions aren’t responded too or feel like they’ve been noted. When I do get Monzo staff who’ve taken their time to reply in the forums it’s been very defensive like it was their decision I’m questioning.

Maybe it’s time to step away from the forums. :thinking:

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Am I reading that right? Send a message to monzo with the word complaint and they throw money at you? :thinking:

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I’ve read @anon99402360 ’s with interest and disappointment. This is the kind of situation Monzo needs to become better at dealing with - particularly if it wants more customers to go full Monzo. It is undeniable that you would have been far less likely to be subjected to that level of uncertainty and stress had you been making such a payment with one of the legacy banks.

It feels to me like Monzo’s processes are built around the needs of millennials, which very rarely include larger payments. For Monzo to be considered as a genuine alternative to legacy banks, it needs to cater to the needs of all of its customer base - not least of all as the needs of its millennial base will grow more complex as customers age.

I first posted about the issue of payment limits in January 2018, so it’s disappointing the process they’ve designed is still so far from being stress-free.

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This is really sad to hear.

For me, the biggest issue here isn’t the waiting time or the inability to raise limits in advance. While they undoubtedly need resolving, the problem seems to be Monzo’s apparent inability to hear what’s being said.

@anon99402360 has made it clear several times that he’s trying to help them improve the process and to become better. But they don’t seem to be listening. Reading this back it feels frustrating and almost Kafkaesque.

I agree with Codf - Monzo needs to do better. As someone else suggested, if COps signal that they’ve read and correctly understand the problem, even if they can’t solve the problem there and then, then that’s a massive step forward.

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I think this is caused by the fact that over a string of 20-25 messages I’ve spoken to 13 different members of the Customer Service and Customer Advocacy team, not once has someone familiar with the claim returned to provide any update or further info. I’ve also had additional team members join the chat but not comment.

It must be so hard to be consistent and yet be familiar with the issue, I don’t envy the COps at the moment at all. It feels completely wrong!

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I hope the business accounts don’t have those limits cause that will be a problem for me

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All accounts have limits

It’s £50,000 for business accounts tho