It’s great that our IBANs have shown up at last. I’m experimenting with what else I can do because I really want to find a decent alternative to the traditional Irish banks.
Anyway, I notice that you can schedule a recurring transfer into a savings account (good), but you can’t schedule a recurring transfer out of a savings account (bad).
This is crazy — why not? This seems like a bug or an oversight. I noticed that it’s also a problem mentioned in the UK Monzo forums as well. I’m looking for more flexibility than I have with AIB.
I’d like to keep as much as I can in my saving account and just move out what I need to meet regular large payments.
The theory is that it is savings. You shouldn’t be touching it unless you HAVE to, and if you needed to access it, you need to do it as soon as possible.
I understand that, but I see that this has been a complaint in the UK too. I want to be able to decide for myself when and how I move my savings around. I want to touch it because I have to touch it for a few days until I get paid, and then once I do get paid, I can replenish it.
I prefer to run my current account at a fairly low ongoing balance and keep as much as possible in my savings account — but I also want the ability to automate the flow of money between all my accounts.
Summary: it’s my money; I want to make the decisions about how I use it and how I move it around. It’s shouldn’t be my bank who makes those decisions. It seems like an arbitrary misfeature to have scheduled withdrawals from one kind of account but not from others. It’s this kind of arbitrary restriction that the traditional banks have that I’m hoping to get away from, and it’s a disappointment to find an arbitrary restriction in a new bank that should be more flexible than this.
It has been. There is sometimes a tendency to defend the status quo but, like you, I think we should strive for better.
I think Monzo is, fundamentally, concerned about its revenue and profit streams. But making it too easy to withdraw money from savings they think they’ll lose the extra revenue they get from the interest margin of keeping money in your current account.
Now, I think that that’s a very narrow view and actually it would be much less of an impact as folk that care about these things would either do it manually or look for alternative solutions. Indeed, I’d take a slight cut in interest rate of money held elsewhere if Monzo could automate stuff for me a bit better.
I think this revenue concern (which is real given that Monzo is still relatively new) and a general sense that the savings people at Monzo wanted to do their own thing have driven this outcome. But time for a rethink, I suggest!
I don’t wish to start a flame war, and I see that there is a number of different opinions on this, so I shan’t argue against them.
The intent of my original post was to register my disappointment with a decision presumably made for business reasons but not for technical reasons. I’m used to disappointment from my traditional bank, and I still hope that Monzo will minimise the disappointments, but in life there are always some disappointments.
I really think that the Community works best when we engage with opinions and suggestions in good faith, engaging with ideas in the spirit of making Monzo better.
Either way its certainly not a bug