This confuses me.
So many people state that ‘now it’s a Current account’ I can’t use it like the prepaid card. I know top-ups are a pain at the moment but that’s being sorted, we’re told.
What stops people feeling they can stick £10 in the account and using it in exactly the same way as the prepaid card?
Until Monzo fleshes out the features of the Current Account, I use the current account exactly like I used the prepaid card. Even to the point I have a weekly standing order set up from my bill/legacy account to Monzo CA to fund it.
Once topups are sorted I guess we can use it as a prepaid card, but it kinda stops you from using the account in full. Because there are no fences or separate pots you can not have direct debits and whatnot. I was hoping this new iteration of monzo to be adding features and not remove or remain the same.
I’m a little bit confused here. Can you clarify what you mean by
With the prepaid card i could use it online without worrying too much (I’ve been burned with the PlayStation network hack before…).
With the current account we now have a lot more features like direct debit, etc. however, since there are no fences between the 
that is available for the debit card and what is available for everything else, I wont be using most of them.
Before DaveTMG jumps in again. I still think the product is great, however with the addition of custom limits/virtual cards/whatever it would be a lot more interesting and useful for those who are heavy online shoppers.
It also opens the door to other cool ideas like being able to hand out a card with a max of £50 (?) to your kids (like an allowance), or for your housekeeper to buy groceries, etc.
Apple Pay uses a virtual card number
A lot of this hangs on the ‘Pots’ implementation which (reading between the lines) should be the next thing we see. Depending how this goes, i.e. how strong the partitions between funds are, a lot of what you’re talking about may be realised.
As a non Monzo staff member with no inside information, I’m sort of expecting the first cut of this before Christmas…
I think this would be a great new feature!
something along the lines of what you can get in the US from privacy.com, I think the most important feature (in my opinion) that i would like to see in monzo would be the ability to create burner card numbers or single use numbers for merchants you don’t fully trust 
(obviously some card numbers for subscription services would also need to be persistent)
Ash
For purchasing online, giving card details over the phone or signing up for “free” trials, it would be nice to be able to create a temporary card number that only lasts a day to minimise and chance of theft or fraud
Having just had to sit through with my bank and deal with a bunch of fraudulent claims, being able to generate “burner” cards would be perfect, or 2FA with purchases, customisable to each user e.g. 2FA required for purchases over X, or on all online transactions etc.
While I like this idea, I always wonder how long it will be before ‘the system’ runs out of credit card numbers when this sort of approach becomes commonplace.
If I understand correctly, the first four digits of the card number must all be the same for every single card issued by the same bank, with the first two being reserved for MasterCard. This means the remaining twelve digits could be one of any 12^12 combinations which is I don’t know how many trillions that number is. Numbers that big just hurt my head!
So if everyone on Earth had an average of say 200 cards including virtualised ones. That’d mean by today’s population figure of roughly 7.5 billion people, there’d be 1.5 trillion cards in the world. While that is a big number, it’s so minutely small compared to the number of possible card number combinations that it shouldn’t be a concern.
However, I’m not sure if the virtual cards would be required to bare the same four digit prefix as the main card as they’re merely an abstraction on top of it. This would mean they’d be able to have a card number with any one of 16^16 combinations.
Don’t think this something to be concerned about for quite sometime 
Also, if you don’t know this site, It’s Wolfarm Alpha Just an incredible search engine for all this maths.
It’s only one trillion, so if everyone alive right now had a virtual card per different merchant they use we’d potentially be on trouble soon
Population growth is exponential. Not something to discount imo 
Edit: just assuming everyone uses a tokenisation solution like android or ApplePay it halves the card space to 500 billion
It’s one trillion for one bank issuing cards with same 4 digit numbers at the start. For example, Monzo prepaid cards were I think with 5354 and now debit cards start with 5355, so Monzo can issue a trillion cards with each of these theoretically.
I think Monzo’s BIN number is first 6 digits of our cards which means if we calculate the maximum number of cards possible with remaining 10 digits it would be 10 billion, and that’s just for Monzo 
World population is I think less than 8 billion currently. A trillion is x1000 of a billion so I think we’ll OK with card number for some time 
Since the last number is a check-sum it’s only 9 digits, which “only” leaves us with 1 billion per issuer. And I think there were plans a while ago to increase the BIN length to 8 characters, but I haven’t heard anymore of that for a long time. Looks like that idea may have come to a halt (I think mastercard was strongly against it).
While that is a large number, I don’t think it’s unthinkable that a provider that (a) takes tokenisation to the extreme, and/or (b) gets world wide reach, would require more than one BIN, and/or would need to recycle PANs (account numbers) much faster than is currently the case.
And some really interesting stuff is going to happen once we get funky BIN ranges. I think mastercard are beginning to issue BINs starting with a 2. Given how many problems people were having with Monzo’s BIN at the beginning, because merchants hadn’t updated their databases, I don’t think that’s going to be a pleasant experience for the customer 
Yes, BINS starting with 222100 to 272099 They have been sending those for a while now so I presume most vendors are actually already updated.
Interesting. Never seen one yet…
