✅ Regular card payments from pots (Monzo Plus Virtual Card)

It would really help if Monzo would allow regular card payments to be paid out of pots in the same way direct debits are. The reason sited is that they can’t be absolutely sure of the date it comes out, but if a direct debit is paid out of a pot and there is insufficient funds, it is taken from your main balance. So I don’t understand the thinking behind not allowing regular card payments to be taken in the same way. Monzo has really helped me get to grip with my finances and enabled me to budget sensibly, this last little thing would top Monzo off as the perfect bank!

Hi Pam & welcome :wave:

Bear in mind that ALL payments are taken from the main balance, never from a pot.
In the case of a payment made from a bills pot, it isn’t really. The amount of the bill is transferred from the designated bills pot to the main account just in advance of the bill being taken from the main account. In the case of CPA’s it is impossible for Monzo to know exactly when the CPA will be paid and so can’t do the same function.

I’d like it too though :wink:

Yes I understand how the pots work. But I don’t see the relevance of them not knowing when the card payments will be taken.

You can’t add things to the authorisation queue. It takes fractions of seconds and checking a pot isn’t going to join that queue.

Monzo know that you’re going to pay a direct debit tomorrow.

Monzo doesn’t know that you’re going to buy something from Amazon. Or when Amazon will charge you for Prime etc.

They have the function to predict the payment in the summary when it repeats. There is even an opt in/out to predict repeating payments, regardless of source, so I disagree that it is not possible.

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Direct Debits are at the mercy of the bank to carry out. The merchant issues their collection notice 5 days prior to the date they expect the payment to be made. Banks get this information ~3 days prior. From that point, the bank is entirely in charge of the time and process of how the money leaves your account (within the expectations of the direct debit). As such, Monzo can happily take their time in moving money from your pot into your main balance.

With card transactions, Monzo can roughly predict the day, sure. But they aren’t in control of anything other than the authorisation.

If a merchant usually bills you at 4am, but one month doesn’t bill you until 4pm, what do you expect to happen?

Monzo could just move the money at midnight, “just incase” it’s today. But that’s not an amazing user experience - you’ve put money aside to not worry about spending it, but now it’s in your main balance for x number of hours.

What about if the merchant bills you late, or early, and monzo weren’t expecting it? Well, do monzo authorise it and let you go into an overdraft? Not authorise it, and risk the merchant terminate your account (Monzo will then get blamed for not moving the money from a pot)?

Nobody said it’s “not possible” in the sense it can’t be done. It presently can’t be done reliably as Monzo get no notification of the payment request prior to the authorisation being requested. Anything where they provide predictions for budgeting purposes is guess work, but if the budgeting feature is a day out, nobody is going to be complaining money has been lost, not taken, or memberships cancelled.

After the numerous high Street banking fiascos, we’ve all seen how Joe public isn’t very accepting of their bank not functioning properly.

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You could do this how you want with IFTTT, but you’ll need to have the money in your account and pot, as it comes from the account first and is replaced from the pot.

What is IFTTT @Revels ?
@alawrence I would be happy for monzo to move/isolate this money earlier if it meant it was able to be included in your pots.

I put this forward as an idea/suggestion so that perhaps Monzo can look in to making it work.

ifttt.com allows you to build automation flows with/between apps & services. It’s a large platform with all sorts of nifty modules & applets - thanks to an IFTTT applet, my kitchen lights flash red each time the ISS flies overhead… :smile:

With regards to Continuous Payment Authorisations being managed via a bills pot, it has been discussed at length previously, for example, the thread below has 99 votes and you could make it 100!

EDIT: with 99 votes, it currently stands at #23 in the list of open Feedback & Ideas topic

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It would be good if a member of @Coral-Crew could merge this into the existing one please.

(Also not sure if this is a thing but it would be really good if discourse could somehow allow merging the unique votes from threads wouldnt it?)

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@davidwalton done!

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Your vote has bumped it up a place to #22 in the list of open Feedback & ideas topic :+1:

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Hi @davidwalton I see you’ve suggested using IFTTT but I’d personally rather not for security reasons.

I have an alternative suggestion/“thought process”. What about having a pot that a virtual card ‘always uses’?

That way you could have all your committed payments always use a virtual card that uses that pot and therefore when you get paid you simply refill the pot in prep for that months’ committed payments.

Regards, Matt

Welcome back :wave:

In that case, you’ll need to vote for this one;

It’s currently #13 in the list of wishes, with 141 votes.

EDIt: I see you already have…

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Amazing!!! Just what I wanted. I’ve gone and made my vote!

Thanks @davidwalton :+1:

Matt

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