Ultimately, my biggest draw to Monzo (at first, anyway) was the piece of mind from push notifications. Seeing stories of people who managed to stop suspicious activity at the earliest chance was amazing - especially with stories of legacy banks and small withdrawals going unnoticed between transactions in statements or on apps.
I’m still yet to hear of any UK bank who offers something like Monzo or Starling (and the other challenger banks). Although I did read something in the Community about somebody setting their spending text alerts to any transaction equal or higher than £0.01.
Which banks offer anything similar, either the text alerts for transactions or push notifications?
While not a bank, I know American Express Credit Cards provide push notifications when I spend something and I can setup an e-mail alert if I go over a specific threshold set by myself.
I have a Gold card, and only receive notifications for statements - I’ve never successfully activated the transaction notifications, with little help from the customer service number
I used to get the Amex notifications on every purchase, but since they updated the app and made it all shiny and new they’ve stopped! I can’t get any sense out of Customer Services either as nobody seems to understand the problem.
It was really useful and my favourite feature of both Amex and Monzo - I once managed to reverse a transaction for several hundred Swiss Francs when a hotel charged my card instead of a colleague’s thanks to the notification from Amex.
I found with AMEX I also had to have the card added to apple pay for the notifications to show. No idea as to why but if the card wasn’t on apple pay no notifications came through and vice versa!
This is total guesswork based on observations of my personal cards and those of others.
I don’t know how Amex handles these but from what you’ve just described, I would bet that these notifications are being sent through Amex’s Apple Pay transaction notification service, rather than as App Notifications.
In a similar way, my Nationwide card receives Apple Pay transaction notifications that look like they are coming from the Nationwide app (same icon, etc). American Express just appears to send notifications from all of your cards, not just purchases made through Apple Pay due to differences in their backend verses Visa or Mastercard’s systems.
I’m not even kidding, I spent forever trying to figure it out through the AMEX app and got nothing out of it. I eventually just went into Apple Pay and didn’t remove my card or anything but just opened a couple screens and immediately started getting push notifications again. Rather confident it’s an issue with Apple Pay overriding them, just go to the card in your Apple Pay and play around for a bit / maybe get rid of the card and re-add it and push notifications for spending alerts should come back.
