It works like the Bills Pot. Money comes out of the main account, and then a transfer is made immediately from the specified pot to cover the transaction. If you don’t have enough money in the pot, it’d be covered from the main account.
It comes directly out of the Pot. This would need a new feed for pots, and lots of behind the scenes action. If you don’t have money in the pot, the transaction would be declined.
Neither option would be quick, but option 1 might be quite a bit faster to deliver than option 2.
Now, there are no guarantees that Monzo will build this - or that another option might fly in from nowhere.
But, knowing the trade-off in time, and the general options outlined above, which option would you prefer?
Option 1: Works like a Bills Pot (money out of main, then transfer from pot)
Option 2: Works like an account (money directly from pot)
0voters
To be clear, this isn’t a Monzo poll, this isn’t a democracy (so the winning option might not be what happens) and it might not happen anyway! And do bear in mind that we’re a specific subset of user. Folk who don’t come on the community might have a whole different set of views.
With that said, vote! (I’ve become a parody of myself, haven’t I?)
Thank you so much for calling this out. We really appreciate and take the views of our community seriously when building features, but sometimes research we do with other groups has a different view that we may end up going with. Please keep always sharing your thoughts with us
I’m going to contradict myself vs what I said in the other thread, and how I voted here… But. I now think I actually want both. Hear me out!
These are my ideal use cases for a Virtual Card:
All my online shopping - any purchase I do online now comes from a VCard - this I want from my main account, per current behaviour.
Online Subscriptions - I would like these akin to a Bills Pot - but I have a separate Vcard for these because of how pesky some can be to cancel.
Specific retailer shopping, with whom I want to limit my spending - these scenarios I want a segregated account. So I can’t spend more than Pot Value.
Specific Categories of spending - same sort of thing, I might give myself a “fun budget” I don’t want to exceed - once the pot is empty I can’t spend any more.
There’s probably other use cases that are very good for both; but actually, both would be really powerful.
Although, with even more thinking, I suspect that in my own internal priority list, I would have more uses for “Freeze a VCard” or “One Time Only” VCard than I might my latter 2 examples.
Aaaand now I’m having an internal conflict of “How do pots fit into Monzo Budgeting” again.
Either pots are effectively budget categories, or they are full accounts.
For example, in bunq pots are full accounts, have an IBAN, and one can dynamically switch which pot the debit card is attached. And then one can attach virtual card to the same or different one. It also has it’s own feed, and contributes to jumbo feed and can receive direct payments in. Can send money out directly. Can have direct debits. Kind of like a joint account… Apart from it’s just me, myself, and I.
Or pots remain stashes which transfer money to the main account to fill gaps created by bills / virtual / physical card payments.
It is true that both methods have it’s UX and implementation ups and downs.
I personally have just the one virtual card for everything distance payments. As it means my digital life is detached from physical card. And I need to update digital card details less often as expiry on the virtual card is longer. Thus I don’t have need for pots, or payments from pots to be anything more than transfer money to the main account.
I feel like there’s another solution. To be able to set rules on the account. So something between the rules you get in for example Outlook and IFTTT.
The idea being we can set our own custom triggers for actions to happen on our accounts. One of those triggers should be payments from virtual cards which will cover off the payments from pots issue.
I’d say this is almost definitely a feature for Plus though.
I was wondering if you could just process from the main account, then move later when there’s no time constraint? If overdrafts are the issue, could you dynamically change the technical overdraft behind the scenes so that your overdraft is agreed overdraft + value in pot? Then you could process the pot transfer in a relaxed couple of seconds after the card transaction has processed?
(Forgive my curiosity here: I know that you’re probably rolling your eyes at enthusiastic amateurs giving “solutions” that are probably anything but).
We actually had this same conversation this morning and it took me a second to remember why this doesn’t work
If you do this then you can’t use any money “set aside” for the payment (as I think you’re hinting at). You’d want to consider the main account balance plus the pot balance, which is tricky (though of course not impossible) for us to do right now.
I think its a case of if its worth doing then its worth doing right, id rather it take an additional x number of months if it was polished as opposed to a stop gap version like the current bills pot.
My suggestion (even as a stepping stone for now) would be to have IFTTT triggers based on if the payment was from a virtual card or not.
This way, I could set up an applet to move money out of a pot if the payment was from said card.
Use case:
I pay for Xbox games using VC1, and a games pass subscription using VC2, however both show as “Microsoft” or “Xbox” (Microsoft use them interchangeably) in my feed.
Using IFTTT, I could assign VC2 to trigger so that when I pay my subscription, IFTTT takes the money out of the pot I use for my other bills.
I can then also use VC2 for Netflix, Spotify, and achieve the same thing.
1 can be done with IFTTT for those who really want it. I think it should be the opposite of 1 - pot to main transfer then payment. I wouldn’t want it declined if the main balance isn’t enough but the pot balance is!
I think unfortunately the timing required by the Mastercard payment gateway means the ‘accept transaction’ decision has to be near-instant, and doesn’t give enough time to check a pot balance, if I recall the conversations from the Bills Pots discussion correctly.
Possibly way off but assuming the following steps are currently taken:
Transaction request arrives
Match card number to account
Check balance
Process transaction
I don’t see how it’s any slower to:
Transaction request arrives
Match card number to account/pot
Check balance
Process transaction
I suppose it’s possible that something in the backend makes retrieving a pot balance significantly slower than an account balance but I’d be surprised. I imagine it’s an extra database column (is the card tied to an account or a pot) alongside the ID then a branch to get the balance from the correct place.
It seems a solution would be to have the money actually be taken directly from a pot, but make the feed item look like something from Bills Pots in the Home feed (i.e., Show the pot withdrawal transaction followed by the card transaction in the Home feed).
Also, it seems that the above could be extended to paying card subscription payments from Bills Pots.
So basically it works just like bill pots for the user but not really in the implementation? If so then a great solution. Wasn’t there talk of regulatory issues as it would make pots a payment account?
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