I’ve explained a few times in this thread, but here’s a brief overview of my issue.
- As @j06 mentioned, high street banks will give you two different balances. One includes pending transactions, one doesn’t.
- Monzo give you one balance that includes all pending transactions.
- According to my Monzo app, I am overdrawn.
- In Monzo’s own terms and conditions, whether you are charged for your overdraft depends on the “finalised available balance (excluding pots)”.
- The “finalised available balance (excluding pots)” is not visible in the app.
- I have pre-authorised payments that add up to more than the overdraft amount.
- I am not actually overdrawn and will not get charged.
- To work around this, I ask customer support to revert the transaction so that, when it actually comes out of my balance, it’s show as a “delayed transaction”. With high street banks I don’t need to do this.
The issue isn’t whether I can spend the money or not, it’s visibility of what my real balance is. That’s what Monzo does differently. That’s the issue I’m having.
I’ve been in email conversations with Monzo about this following the release of their updated overdraft terms and conditions and fact that the balance used to calculate when to charge an overdraft is explicitly mentioned (as quoted above) but isn’t visible anywhere can potentially be a big problem.
Monzo have acknowledged this as a problem and are going to try and surface this in a way that makes sense and isn’t confusing (again, as @j06 rightly points out, high street banks don’t explain the difference between the two balances and what is causing one to be different to the other very well, which I’m sure Monzo will do much better than anyone else).
Yes I appreciate that in this particular case CDJapan may not be using the card system in the best way, but it’s only really a problem with Monzo, not other banks. However, the problem isn’t limited to pre-orders on CDJapan. You have things like car rental or hotel pre-authorisations that get refunded after so long (7 days? 30 days? who knows). Self service in the app can sometimes revert these, but it doesn’t work for every transaction. If a pre-auth doesn’t auto remove, or gets processed twice, then you’re stuck until they auto expire after 30 days.
Fact is, the way Monzo surface information is fudging the information based on a certain ideology where everything authorised will get taken within a day or two, and it’s just not the case.