I’m Chloe, the User Researcher in the Core Experience squad (we did an intro as a squad a few weeks ago here). As @giorgio mentioned in that thread, the payments tab is definitely an area that needs a bit of attention.
We would love to hear from you about all things to do with paying & getting paid and the payments tab - what isn’t working so well, any ideas you have for improvements and what is working well currently. (Ideally this thread won’t be about card transactions as it would be great to specifically think about paying others and getting paid rather than spending on your card).
I know @Peter_G has some thoughts on this and I would love to hear everyone else’s too!
I’d like it to be clearer which account I’m paying from. Multiple times I’ve paid someone intending it to be from my personal account and it’s come from the joint account.
The only hint about which account I’m paying from is the balance. Sometimes that makes it obvious to me, sometimes it doesn’t.
I’d like to be able to add Flex and connected account transactions to shared tabs, and in the meantime I’d like to be able to categorise manual transactions on the tab.
First, it’s probably worth saying that bill splits actually work pretty well. Similarly, shared tabs (when I was in a shared house) was a great way of managing bills.
My number one complaint remains the situation whereby the monzo app sends money without ever confirming the amount. This should never happen.
Other than that, though, the only feature I sometimes wish I had is the ability to split arbitrary amounts. This would be useful if, for example, I’ve paid for a group holiday or bought event tickets on credit card, and want to split the amount and request money.
Please paying off someone incrementally would be a great feature, for example, my wife and I have wedding expenses we share and we split. On Monzo payments tab I can see how much I am owed and owing in general from all the requests and splits (which is excellent)
However I would have loved to use the shared tabs for this and the only reason I didn’t was that you have to settle it entirely, as there is no ability to do it incrementally. Would be great if it could be something similar to splitwise, where you can just pay someone and it updates the balance
As mentioned all too much on here, the ability to add notes to a bill split would be fantastic.
I also get a bit confused about the “Pay via Monzo” / Monzo Account options when going to Pay and selecting a contact. Both options are technically paying from Monzo so I don’t know why they need to be split out?
Agree with the post above about wanting to be able to add Flex transactions to shared tabs. I have also found myself going to split Flex transactions and not being able to. If my partner has his half of the money then it would be good if this could be paid straight off of the transaction via a bill split. Equally, I am finding myself at the moment flexing something and then having to send separate payment requests (i.e. Expensive purchase - payment 1, Expensive purchase - payment 2) etc so they can pay me back in the same installments.
My first thought on this, without being able to go to the app to check for more points, is that when I am sending money to someone (bank transfer) it is not clear to me that Monzo has checked the name of the payee and it has been confirmed to be correct.
I think I remember one occassion where I tested it and when the name is not correct it shows very clearly, but it would be useful to have a clearer experience when the name is correct.
My main feedback would be put favourites at the top, give the user the option to hide or remove social features if they never use them and give it a lil tidy up UI wise.
As someone who doesn’t use bill splits, shared tabs or Monzo contacts, I find the payments tab cluttered and difficult to use when trying to pay a previous payee. It’s a lot of scrolling to get to recent/ favourite payees, and the “see payees” button doesn’t stand out compared to “pay someone” or “request money” buttons. To be completely honest I only noticed the “see payees” button as I was gathering my thoughts for feedback on the page.
Being able to hide the sections for features I don’t use or be able to place recent and favourite payees widgets above them would improve things for me.
I agree that the payees for transfers needs to be a little clearer. I see some favourites at the bottom of the screen then further down I see names I’ve got added. Seems a bit all over when I want to make a transfer payment. Perhaps just having a drop down menu of the people you have saved when it comes to paying someone, rather than a sea of bubble initials all over the screen lol
With how the accounts are set out: I’d like to see all the accounts set out in the new format (listed). I don’t like how the pots are put in a square section below the transactions separate to my current and flex account. I’d like to see them all in one place (I get some people don’t want to see their pots as it might encourage spending) but it looks a little all over the place with sections split all over the app. I like apps to be neat, tidy and simplistic.
This is probably only because I don’t understand tabs/can’t figure out how to use them, but it would be cool if we could partially pay off a split. There are times when the other half has paid for tickets or something and is happy for me to pay in two parts. Would be cool if we could do that in the one request.
Seen a few here about partially settling a shared tab and/or bill split which is something I’ve brought up before, and would love to come to fruition!
I often pay my wife back for certain large essential bills which we add to a shared tab to keep track of it, but then it’s clunky trying to add money I pay her back with to the shared tab to reduce the amount I owe correctly.
There’s an app called Horde (Scandinavian turned European availability) which has this kind of feature with fees/interest which I reckon Monzo could create - Maybe even do themselves as a “credit” feature (but that’s just me spitballing )
@chloelawrence Please, please let me associate my credit cards with the payment details required to pay them off, and give me a one click option which defaults to paying the full outstanding balance …
I actually think the Payments tab is good. The flexibility of being able to merge multiple accounts to a single payee is probably one of the things I most like about Monzo when I compare it to other banks. I hope this remains following any work on the tab.
My biggest issue with payments/transfers is actually how Monzo treats the display of bank transfer references on the transaction screens in the feed. Not sure if this falls within the scope of what you’re asking but I think its a major issue. The current behaviour seems to be to copy the reference into the user-editable notes field. If the user then edits the notes field, this can then lead to loss of of the original bank transfer reference from the transaction screen. You should really display an immutable transfer reference field and not link it to the user-editable notes field. For me, the current behaviour renders the notes field useless for transactions involving bank transfers and is one factor stopping me upgrading to Plus ** . There’s more description/discussion here.
** What I mean by this is to upgrade to Plus I’d need to be convinced to stop using a different aggregator and use Monzo Plus instead. But one of the reasons I use a different aggregator is as a workaround to the above issue (I can enter notes there without affecting the transfer reference in the Monzo app).
)
