New user joint account teething questions

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Hi. I’m a very new user to Monzo - I recently moved my banking away from my traditional bank after a series of disappointing experiences (local branch closures, discontinuation of premium accounts, incredibly cumbersome international transfers process, poor digital offering etc). I figured that most of my gripes were related to the outmoded approach of traditional banks so a ‘new’ bank such as Monzo may therefore be a good match to my needs.

I’ve completed the switch using CASS. I was going to trial Monzo for a while before committing, but my traditional bank flagged the transfers to Monzo as ‘suspicious activity’, locked my account, and left me on the phone for over 60 minutes to prove I was me. I approve of the activity being flagged as suspicious, but object to sitting on hold for so long to prove my money is mine… Anyway, the experience pushed me into voting with my feet and I pulled the plug on the old bank immediately.

The above preamble is to give some context to the questions I have below. I thought I did my research into Monzo, but admit to being caught out by the difference in functionality offered on personal and joint accounts - hindsight is wonderful, but I don’t think it even occurred to me that the functionality of a joint account would be limited, so I doubt I even asked the question. From my perspective, a lot of the reasons I was interested in Monzo seem to not be available to me at this point.

I’ve read the forum fairly widely and I can tell there has been a lot of historical discussion about this but, with so much info, it is difficult to distill it down to a current view.

So, I guess I’m looking for help to understand where the joint account ‘fits’ into the Monzo offering - now and into the future. Is it likely that the joint account will remain the poor cousin to the personal account, or is there hope that the functionality of the accounts will reach parity in the near future? Will Monzo seek to innovate with the joint account or, as seems to be the case at the moment, will the personal account be the trail blazer with the joint account left at the bottom of the hill until someone can be bothered to throw down a rope…? Finally, I know this has been asked a load before but I can’t see a recent perspective on the forum, is it likely that I will be able to upgrade my joint account to premium any time soon…?

I know the answers to these questions will be subjective and are unlikely to be from an informed position, however, the opinions based on long-term experience is likely to be very valuable.

Thanks for any thoughts!

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Hi. Welcome.

I would think as TS has taken over as CEO, that Monzo will be more “serious” about the future and I’m sure joint accounts come into that.

There are a lot of people (@davidwalton) that are fighting the good fight for joint account upgrades and there have been multiple Monzo staff members that say they want to improve the joint account, bring Plus/Premium to it.

If/when that will happen is anyone’s guess really.

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I think this is the thing sadly.

I’ve seen a fair number of ‘we’d love to bring this to joint accounts too’ from individual Monzo staff…but obviously it’s not just their decision and here we are years later with no sign of parity at all.

So I think it would be best to assume nothing coming soon, and fingers crossed we’ll be pleasantly surprised one day.

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Hi Malcolm & welcome :wave:

As said above - no-one here knows if/when Joint Accounts will reach parity with Personal accounts. There’s a lot of history to this and I keep mentioning the disparity to keep it visible. The truth is, Joint accounts are only a small percentage of the Monzo account types and for many reasons Monzo had to concentrate on generating both user numbers and income streams.

This has mostly been done (with a possible credit offering that has been teased) so at some stage development of Joint accounts could be possible using the Personal account development experience.

I’m still suspecting a fundamental architecture issue though - where the 2 people must have a Personal account to then be able to ‘join’ to a Joint account. This doesn’t make sense because the Joint account is a totally separate bank account with no banking connection to the 2 Personal accounts. It may be way more work than expected :thinking:

On with the fight :facepunch:

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Thanks for the replies. Doesn’t sound too encouraging really! Incidentally, I’ve been back through some of the info provided by Monzo that is available to casual non-customers like myself and can’t find much (anything) to indicate that joint accounts are limited. I’m sure it is there somewhere, if you know to look for it. Can’t help feeling a bit like I’ve been seduced by slick marketing though - probably just sour grapes typing. Hopefully the rest of the experience lives up to the hype.

Anyway, I’m here now and don’t really want to be chopping and changing banks all the time so I guess I’ll give it a bit longer and hope that the things that get Monzo to the top of the banking experience rankings (that brought them to my attention) outweigh the limitations of the joint account. In the meantime, I guess I need to work out how to join the RAC and insure our phones! I think travel insurance can wait a bit!

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I have Premium on my Personal account and have shifted things like small savings (Holidays and Xmas) so I get the sub-£2K interest applied and I also have travel and device insurance. I don’t need breakdown cover at this stage but could do in the near future and the RAC one through Monzo is a good offer.

Salaries, auto-paying bills and general day-to-day spending is still via the Joint account.

Hanging in there for Joint account development though… we have too much fun inserting comments in each others transactions, hilarious and dangerous fun with MrsW, aka SWMBO

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Has she rebranded, a bit like ABRDN?

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Joint accounts arent really limited compared to a basic personal account.

You just can’t improve the joint account.

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Definitely today. I was given orders, I carried them out, like a military marriage mission.

#winning

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I’m aware of the lack of overdraft and premium, but perhaps this thread could do with a list of all of the limitations between joint and personal account? That would provide more context for asking for parity.

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Sure - I meant limited compared with my expectations for how I would use Monzo - it is the premium features that make Monzo interesting to me. Some of the features that seem to not be offered on joint accounts - virtual cards, custom categories, splitting a transaction between multiple categories are the things that, to me, set Monzo apart from my experience of traditional banks. So far (admittedly I’ve not been through a full month yet) the functionality of the joint account seems to not be wildly different to the one offered by my previous bank. Without the premium features, on balance, the offering from Monzo seems to me to be more limited than I had before with a premium account at a high street bank.

At least I can’t fall out with Monzo for closing all the branches local to me, so I guess I’ll be here for a while! If and when Monzo catches up (and instantly overtakes) high street banks’ joint accounts, I’ll be very happy!

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In my case I think I’m just referring to the lack of premium features - not so much the ‘headliners’ (e.g. insurance) but custom categories, ability to split transactions across multiple categories, virtual cards, linking to other bank accounts, ‘better’ interest rate, I think you can apply multiples to roundups, bigger allowance for cash withdrawals abroad. Those are the things I have so far been disappointed to find I cannot use. Totally my fault for poor due diligence. Unfortunately, the major benefits (to me) require me to use a premium account as my main account. As a happy joint account holder for nearly two decades, I can see how that conversation would go…!

I wasn’t aware of the overdraft thing but that doesn’t bother me tbh. If there are other differences I’d also like to know - I haven’t paid any attention to the individual account.

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3rd post on this voting topic lists the JA let-downs (thanks for voting for it too :+1:)

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I can’t understand why both Monzo and Starling don’t offer overdrafts on their joint accounts.

I’m hopeful that Starling’s recent withdrawal of personal borrowing features envisages a relaunched set of lending features, including joint overdrafts and credit cards.

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Sadly the functionality gap between sole and joint accounts only seems to widen. Do we know what percentage of Monzo accounts are joint?

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I know this is a bit unorthodox, but if insurance is what you really want from a (packaged) joint account then you could open another joint account elsewhere just for this purpose. Nationwide FlexPlus is commonly mentioned as a good pick, but there is also Halifax or even Co-op if the mix of insurances are better for your circumstances.

You could then keep using Monzo for your spending, income and everything else - but you would be covered by the insurance at your other joint account.

Obviously, the hope would be that one day Monzo will offer plus/premium insurances for joint users, and at that stage you could shut down the other account if you wanted to.

It may also be helpful to have a second backup account for cash and cheques, as you’ve probably gathered from your reading that Monzo don’t really deal with those very well.

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Hi. Thanks for the good advice, but I was being a bit flippant as I felt I was doing a lot of moaning! For me, it is the bank account functionality that is most interesting from a Monzo premium account. The insurance stuff would be a bonus as it reduces the hassle of sorting them out separately, but is not why I want the premium account!

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While I would like most of the stuff on that list they’re mostly new feature requests not parity issues per say…

I can only count a few of parity things… My opinion of course :grin:

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In case it is useful to anyone else in my position who may be reading this, I’ve had a chance this morning to discover some of the functionality that is open to a joint account user.

The ability to tag transactions doesn’t solve many of my account management desires, but it does give some custom categorisation options. The transactions cannot be split, but at least one can assign a transaction to multiple custom categories. Which is nice.

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I agree with your opinion there.

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