I recently spoke to the support team about this. Monzo includes my middle name on statements (which seems excessive but I can live with) and on transactions (such as faster payments etc), where I’d really rather it not be.
I was told that this is due to legal requirements, but when I pointed out that other banks have me on transactions as Surname + First name or Initial plus Surname it was shrugged aside.
Now, maybe it’s technically difficult to change. Or maybe Monzo is reflecting the absolute letter of the law. But it does fall short of my usual expectations from Monzo - and isn’t particularly customer focused.
(As a general aside, it really pushes my buttons when institutions hide behind “the law” or “banking regulations” or “the data protection act” - when actually they have discretion about how to comply. And it’s impossible to talk to anyone about it. I’d be much happier with “we’re just not going to do it”. Blunt, but you know where you stand).
I’ve just checked on this one and as of late last week, middle names are excluded from outbound Faster Payments. This has been a long time coming but was driven entirely by community request.
To address the wider issue of legal names on Faster Payments, this is genuinely an area where we must tread carefully as a smaller bank. I can’t entirely comment on how other banks do it the way they do but the main laws and financial regulations that affect this are known as AML (Anti Money Laundering) and KYC (Know Your Customer).
While I totally understand that it may seem like we’re hiding behind the law here, AML and KYC are two of the things that as a financial service, we can not afford to mess up. With everything we do, we’re trying to find the correct balance between what different groups of people want and what our responsibilities as a bank are to combat financial crime.
Sometimes we can get the balance a little off, as we have with including middle names. This particularly was also a technical limitation as our system does not store the components of a name separately, but rather as one single string (We do this to avoid many issues with names across the world!).
We will continue to work on this problem but it’s a much larger issue than it may seem from the outside and one of the not so happy sides of banking.
On a purely personal note, as much as I don’t want to hate on another bank, I’d highly recommend watching Netflix’s Dirty Money series. In particular, the fourth episode is an insight into some of the reasons why we take this so seriously and what happens when AML laws aren’t followed!
That’s encouraging, and I’ll certainly be looking forward to testing faster payments (e.g. bank transfers) in the next update.
All my legacy banks just use Initials + Surname, so I don’t really believe any legal speak that states otherwise. But I do accept the technical reason and that it requires software changes.
This issue is my main obstacle preventing Monzo being much more than a cash card for shopping, which isn’t the end of the world since I have other bank accounts elsewhere for different purposes. But I was kind of intending using Monzo to go “cashless”, including making payments to friends. But not until there’s no chance of them laughing at my middle name.
Apologies for taking so long to reply, but I wanted to say that replies like this are, for me, the reason I’m a Monzo user. Thanks in particular for taking the time to engage with what’s been posted here and coming back with a well informed and balanced post.
(Slightly side note, there seems to be more of a Monzo presence on the forum over the last week or so. It’s really noticeable and helps a lot - so thank you (again)!)
I would love preferred name in the app, and when contacted by any of the Monzo team (I go by Ken). But I understand the requirements for legal name on the card, statements and Monzo.me (Kenneth). So basically, what the paper is saying, I agree with completely.
One thing I would love to see is a Username option (even if this can’t be changed when set, similar to PlayStation for apparent legal reasons to trace accounts/ abuse/ etc). This would be handy for logging into Monzo from a new device and also for the monzo.me/username (but once the link is open I would expect to see the legal name displayed). I believe this latter would also help with the countless John Smith’s in the world haha.
Yeah, but then is it johnsmith2 and up to johnsmith8942 (if 8,942 of them sign up?) lol.
Personally, my main reason is I use the same Alias for EVERYTHING haha, so would much rather see that in my monzo.me link (monzo.me/TheSilentHarp), and then once opened it’d display my profile picture and legal name, but customized username. My own name alone is shared by my father and his, so if the three of us signed up you’d need to know which is which lol.
My John Smith example is just sheer popularity of the name haha (James Smith however is the most popular name in USA with 38,313 recorded individuals - not that I’d expect them all to be signing up haha).
And definitely a feature rather than shortcoming just a preference.
I’ve also come across this today, when I generated a statement for the first time and saw it included my middle name (which, incidentally, I haven’t seen anywhere else in the app, except when I signed up and included it because of matching my ID, etc. I never use my middle name, so the few times I have to generate a statement for something, I’ll put it through Acrobat to remove my middle name, but that’s not ideal to be honest.
I’ve also just noticed when generating a statement in app it shows my middle name, but I didn’t give Monzo my middle name when I signed up because I hate it and avoid using it at all costs. How on earth has it ended up being there when I generate a statement?
This has been a long time coming but was driven entirely by community request.
Monzo user. Thanks in particular for taking the time to engage with what’s been posted here and coming back with a well informed and balanced post.
just a preference.
So glad Monzo lets us all be our true selves!
. Maybe it’s about time I looked into getting my middle name officially removed then.