Payments wishlist

In addition to doing all the transaction stuff well - accurate names, locations and categorisation for budgeting and a solid API, since the launch of the CA I’ve started to think about all the ways payments could be made so much easier as well.

Paypal like service
Rather than having to enter card details again and again, it would be great to simply be able to hit “Pay with Monzo” on the merchants website, it would go to a simple oauth one click authentication with the amount and 2 factor authentication for security. If you wanted to pay the merchant again later you could just use google authenticator or SMS code to reverify.

Direct debits, rather than just being pulled from the account could be authorised via a notification with each one authorised as it goes out.

Identity based payments
I should be able to find a person by their name, email or phone number to be able to send them money or request money from them. Instead of checking and checking an entirely arbitrary set of numbers to make sure they’re correct, just see a photo, name and whatever other distinguishing information.

Requested money could appear in my ‘expected’ file so I can see what I expect to have in the future.

Group kitty/crowdfunded payments
I think this has been around a few times on the forum before - but it could completely change being in a shared house since it would remove any risk of other people not paying/reclaiming money and the accounting that goes along with that.

Automatic/rule based/natural language based payments
I’ve seen suggested the idea at the end of the month you can set your account to clear any money above say £500 into a savings pot. Or it could be set to donate 5% of monthly expenditure to charity (assuming there is enough left in the pot).

Also for scheduled payments I’d like to be able to setup “Pay my cleaner £20 every two weeks for 3 months with a reminder every 3 payments” or “Send £100 to Charlie on the last day of each month”, “Request £10 ev thurs from Nina“.

Could there be conditional payments that interact with other APIs? “Pay £10 to Bob if it’s hotter than 10 degrees next Wednesday”

A lot of these things could start off built just as monzo to monzo features, but ideally in time be integrated into the banking system and replace all the current outdated systems we use.

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That would be cool. You could automate pub bets! “Pay Sam £200 if Trump doesn’t last eight years”

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The issue with payments by name is what happens when there’s a conflict and two people have the same name?

It asks for clarification ofc.

This is something which is naturally going to get better with the “Payment Request API” which a lot of web browsers are implementing. Android Pay is already supported in this, and if I remember Apple has promised to support it as well.

Using a standard method like this means everyone around the world benefits, not just Monzo users :slight_smile:

That reminds me… http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/funny_old_game/1447033.stm

Or if that person has multiple accounts? Which account do you put it in?

Yes that’s an issue - my name is very common so I’d suffer from this. Add photo, email, phone number etc. People who are in your contacts would come up first. The more information that can be confirmed (confirmed bank account, monzo account, photo ID seen) then it can have a verified so you can judge whether it’s the person you actually want to pay.

As for multiple accounts each name would be a profile with metadata and you could pick from the various named accounts the user has listed.