Last night, I placed an order for a new phone and contract through phones.co.uk on their Black Friday deals. All went well and checkout completed as expected. Monzo authorisation worked flawlessly, as usual.
But not 20 minutes later, my order was cancelled by phones.co.uk. There email’s first line read, “We’re unable to process your order, as it has failed to meet our internal credit and security criteria.”
The email went on to mention being a responsible retailer; and something about a 500 point security check. It finished with a ‘helpful’ note that stated they wouldn’t be providing a reason for the cancellation.
This was totally unexpected. I have never missed a payment, ever, and my credit score is relatively high (Their email even stated that they hadn’t carried out a credit check) The only thing that I could think was that I used Monzo for my direct debit and card payment validation and at present I have been with Monzo for just over 2 years.
My logic for believing the it to be linked to Monzo is that when you enter a, ‘length of time with bank’ timescale of over 3 years on the order form, years and months, changes to just years. This gives the impression of 3 years being the magic number.
I repeated the order using my legacy bank account, and at the time of writing this, my order has been accepted. All other details are the same (Delivery address, same order).
Is this just a glitch? Has this happened to you? Have you placed an order with phones.co.uk using Monzo and it worked? Has this happened to you on your legacy bank account?
Not sure if this is the same, but when I picked up my new phone from Vodafone (as a returning customer, not even a new one) and used my card for identity purposes, it failed. I had to go back to my legacy card.
Not sure if it’s because Mastercards aren’t well known to also be debit cards.
Ah Vodafone checking is notoriously over zealous. I remember a while back a phones4u a salesman altered my second signature to more match my first for it to go through Vodafone’s checking.
Is this a discussion that @monzo could have with vodafone’s finance team though. It seems to be a fairly big retailer to be effectively shut off from people who have gone full Monzo. As Monzo grows, it will be in the interest of vodafone to ensure that they can take the business of Monzo’s tech savvy customers.
By asking the question about how long you’ve held your current account, it does make me wonder if that is used as a decision to offer credit sometimes, and some may think that’s a good reason not to swap banks.
Is there anywhere in app that Monzo lists the time that a current account has been open? If some retailers are asking for this, it may be a good idea to have it readily available.
I don’t think this is in relation to your credit history if they stated they didn’t carry out a credit check. The only way for them to know how long you’d held an account with us for would be via a credit check
I suspect your billing address didn’t match the address we held on file for you and when we provided that as part of the authorisation process the merchant decided to cancel the order as they didn’t want to accept the liability shift
It’s a bit difficult to know for sure as I can’t see your account, but feel free to reach out to us if you’d like us to look into this further
Obviously I’d like to think it’s not human error, but these things happen. I think I will contact support, if for no other reason than to provide some clarity.
I plan on changing my payment details to Monzo once the account is set up, so it hasn’t been that big of a deal, more of a minor inconvenience. It would still be nice to know the reason.
If a credit check is done, would they reject if your bank didn’t match what you put on the application? Would be concerned if Monzo don’t report to all agencies and if I put down that I’m Monzo for X years and the company check say, Experian, they wouldn’t see Monzo.
I looked into phones.co.uk and found an order status page. It turns out that my order using my legacy bank was pending a human looking at it, so hadn’t been authorised yet either.
I contacted Vodafone and it would appear that the order never reached them. So purely a Phones.co.uk decision, which they will not elaborate on. They are closed all day Sunday and state in an automatic email response that they are experiencing a very high number of orders and are currently 72 hours behind.
As they are closed on Sunday and the deal is only open until Monday, I have emailed them to cancel my 2nd order also and instead popped into Carphone Warehouse to order a similar deal face to face. All went through fine, although I have to admit to using my legacy bank just to be sure.
The CPW guy was telling me it has been ridiculously busy this weekend and most people have been signing up to Vodafone.
I may never know what caused the rejection, but with a Re-mortgage due soon, I didn’t want to take any chances.