Pay Directly From Personal, Joint & Savings - (One Card, Multiple Accounts)

With the upcoming feature of Bill Splitting and Virtual Savings Pots, it’d be handy if we could easily pay a merchant directly from those virtual accounts that we have access to instead of having to transfer money back to the main account then pay the merchant from there. This would either mean having multiple cards, which is bulky and cumbersome IMHO, or having all accounts stored on one card (Plastc or Curve style), which would require a speciality card distributor and so would likely be more expensive.

Just interested to know your thoughts on this.

That sounds similar to this idea

Tom has touched on the concept before in one of his comments too -

Are you requesting an in-app option to select the account, that you want to use to pay a merchant, for an over the counter transaction though? That could be handy :thumbsup:

Based on the comments from Monzo designers that I’ve seen up until now, my guess is that Monzo would want to come up with a way to automatically select the suitable account / pot to take the payment from, rather than the user having to select it manually for each payment, based on the merchant, time of day etc. through a process similar to the automatic categorisation of transations.

An in-app selection would be a simple solution for now, at least for the purpose of testing the popularity and usability of feature.

I doubt an automatic selection would always be appropriate though. Imagine you regularly shop somewhere, a supermarket for example. You regularly pay for weekly shop out of the Bill Splitting account and your partner hints at you that they’re interested in something expensive they’ve seen at the same shop for their upcoming birthday or anniversary. You wouldn’t want it automatically get selected to come from the usual Bill Splitting account. Instead, I would prefer to be able to select that specific purchase come from a Virtual Savings Pot named “Gifts”. That way the partner would be left unaware that you’ve bought them that gift and of course it would then be 100% gift rather than some money coming from the person that you’re buying for.

I do love the idea of having a different card per subscription service though. Absolutely brilliant idea. Then you could simply cancel/freeze that virtual card if you get into a dispute with that service. That’s getting off-topic, but great idea nonetheless.

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Yes I think the complexity of implementing automatic selection would mean that it takes a long time to develop.

That’s a good point. Obviously this isn’t an issue with categories because you can just change the category after the transaction’s been made but that wouldn’t work if you’re relying on unique accounts (as opposed to simple virtual pots) in order to manage your account :thinking:

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Exactly my point @alexs :slight_smile:

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Just linking everything together directly.

This is covering a subset of features described by my above idea, but with a more traditional name.

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