We are currently seeing a lot of declines coming through this evening whereby our cards are getting rejected when customers attempt to pay at some merchants and withdraw from some ATMs.
Other merchants are working, and after investigating with our engineers, we believe this to be a merchant acquirer issue. A card acquirer is a bank that operates a merchantâs card terminal. This error has resulted in card payments failing at terminals operated by a specific card acquirer. We are currently investigating the issue further to see what we can find out.
If youâre having trouble paying by card, weâd recommend attempting to withdraw cash from the nearest ATM (until the issue is resolved). Barclays ATMs appear to be impacted by the same issue, so we would recommend trying an alternative provider.
We are confident that this is not an error with our systems - however, we felt it best to let you all know.
Weâll post again with an update when we have one!
Our current hypothesis is that itâs the specific merchant acquirer for Mastercard. Meaning that a combination of Mastercard and the affected terminals wouldnât work, but Mastercards will work on terminals operated by different acquirers, and non-Mastercard cards should be fine.
I kind of wish Monzo hadnât apologised in the Status message to be honest. Itâs great that youâre giving users a heads up but the apology is going to make some users think that this is another reliability issue that Monzoâs responsible for
Counterpoint : Whilst I think there is some validity to that argument, ultimately the relationship is between Monzo and our customers.
Itâs why we used to apologise on the prepaid when the infrastructure we used for that used to go down. It wasnât our fault but card processors, merchant acquirers, etc donât mean anything to the end user.
Crikey. Most customers wonât see or understand the difference between a Monzo fail and a fail elsewhere in the process. I think this is exactly the right thing to do.
Sure, but that still doesnât mean anything to the average customer.
If a user gets their card swallowed by a faulty ATM, we say âIâm sorry that this has happened to youâ - apologies donât always indicate fault, they are a token of empathy.
Itâs also happened what seems like every day this week. Now I know it was different parts of the banking system each time and not Monzo, but it looks bad.
Iâm starting to see why banks never tell anyone whatâs going onâŚ
Of course you could do that, but then youâre back to the way legacy banks approach things - or even worse a passive aggressive type of formulation like âIâm sorry if that feel upsetâ (rather than being accountable for the issue that caused the upset).
