I want to preface this thread by saying that I no longer have a high-street current account and that Monzo is my main bank. I’ve used PayPoint before to deposit money into my account, it worked like a charm and I am not particularly bothered about the £1 transaction fee.
That said, this weekend was my birthday and as a result of that, I was given a considerable amount of money in the form of cash.
I wanted to get that money into my account but noticed the ‘£1,000 every 180 days’ deposit limit. As such, my plan was to split the money between me and my partner. I would pay half into my account and then she would pay the other half into her account and then send the money over to me.
The first problem arose when the local corner shop could only process £100 at a time whereas shops like Tesco and Co-Op are able to process £300 at a time.
As such, I went to a Co-Op and had to split the first half of the money into four separate transactions, totaling £8 in fees for my four transactions and my partner’s four transactions. My four transactions went through without a hitch, it was swift and simple.
Then it was my partners turn, she was able to process two transactions before the PayPoint system in the shop locked up. After half an hour, multiple attempts and two phone calls by the shop attendant to PayPoint, we eventually gave in and went to a different Co-Op.
None of the tills at that the second Co-Op worked as the system was offline and so we decided to go to a Tesco.
Lack of training and understanding caused further problems there as the attendant counted and collected all the money beforehand and stored it in a safe that they couldn’t access to get the money back out of. She was able to process one transaction and then the system entered a ‘disabled’ mode.
After 10 minutes of re-trying and troubleshooting, the attendant attempted to call PayPoint, however at that time, their offices were shut, and lines closed.
With my money firmly locked away in the shop safe, the attendant had to empty four tills of cash to give my money back (£100 of which was in £1 and £2 coins).
Feeling severely defeated and fed-up with the whole process, we took to one last shop (another Co-Op) and were able to process the final two transactions without a hitch.
The experience took around three hours, cost me £8 in transaction fees and left me pretty skeptical about the whole process. It also doesn’t help that none of the attendants understand how PayPoint works and as was described to me, all they get in their ‘training’ is a booklet and told to read it and phone if they have questions.
Fortunately, the first Co-Op attendant I spoke to is also a Monzo user and so had some experience with this before, however, it didn’t prove to be very helpful in the end.
I am huge advocate of Monzo and it makes me unhappy to complain, but with PayPoint being an important feature of Monzo because it’s the only method of paying cash into your account, these issues have given me some serious doubts on it’s reliability.
My issues are (in order of importance):
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Why do stores have limits of how much money they can accept. I could understand an upper limit of £1000’s, but £100 / £300 is ridiculous.
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Why are we, as Monzo customers, only able to deposit £1,000 every 180 days? This again seems very low for a 6 month period.
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Every experience I’ve had with PayPoint, bar one, has been the attendant not knowing how the system works and me having to teach them with trial and error so that they can process my deposit.
I’d really appreciate some answers regarding this.
Thank you!
TLDR: Stores don’t know how to use PayPoint and limits enforced by Monzo and PayPoint restrict depositing any sizable amount of money into your account.
