Hi everyone 
I just wanted to share an update about how it’s going.
As I said, we plan to use NatWest as our ‘correspondent bank’ for Euro payments (and, in the longer term, fully integrate with SEPA and SWIFT for all international payments).
To do this, the next step is for us to attempt and receive a test payment, to check that everything’s working as it should, or find and address any issues.
Test payments
These international payments are usually sent through a few different parties before they get to a Monzo account. We’re doing test payments to make sure payments are processed through each party seamlessly, and safely make their way to Monzo!
We’ll try to send a Euro payment from a European bank (i.e. one that’s connected to SEPA) to a Monzo IBAN, and check it arrives as it should.
The issue we identified last week, and are working on right now, is making sure we actually receive the necessary payment messages from NatWest so that we can credit the correct Monzo account.
Testing is an ongoing process: we’ll keep trying payments, fixing any issues that crop up, and trying again until we’re confident we can receive them reliably.
What happens after that?
After that, we’ll need to work out how we handle any FX involved (including how we show you the exchange rates in the app). And we’ll also need to make sure that every bank is able to identify Monzo and route payments to us (in a similar way to our approach to merchant acceptance, we may have to contact some banks directly to do this).
We’re still on track to launch this in the next few months, but we’ll know more definitively in the next few weeks once we’ve been able to successfully receive a test payment. I’ll share any updates on this thread. 