Already done that one 
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I had one of their overpriced pasties for dinner tonight on accident. I went and made it clear I wanted to pay with Monzo, pulled the card out, showed them and said card. They accepted it no questions. Hot coral, two staff. No issue. Too bad, at least I was smart enough to pick one I would want if they did sell it to me!
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Just tried to get breakfast from pasty shop at Liverpool street station and was told “we don’t take monzo”.
I told him it’s a Mastercard and he said “we take mastercard but not monzo… Something about our system not accepting it”. I tried explaining that they took it yesterday without trouble and he said “maybe my colleague didn’t know”, which suggests they can take it but make a conscious decision not to accept specifically monzo.
Any ideas why this might be?
If you’re in the area (monzo office is round the corner so it’s likely a lot of staff commute in to Liverpool Street) give it a try… I recommend the sausage and bacon bap.
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How would they know what card you are paying with? Are you waving your Monzo card around to explain that you wish to pay by card?
This has came up on here before, please report them to MasterCard. I had no problem, unfortunately (I went specifically to test and was hoping they wouldn’t sell me the pasty!). Why would I want to eat anything from a merchant violating MasterCard rules? What other rules might they violate?
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Just a thought. They might have had issues with the prepay card which is informing their view that they can’t take Monzo. Worth persevering if you have the current account card.
In my experience of working for SSP and being an early Monzo user - all it would take is one customer to successfully raise a chargeback for a pathetic amount of bacon in a bacon bap for the area manager to tell everyone to not accept Monzo cards. The area manager is either simon.hilton@ssp.uk.com or Atif.ali@ssp.uk.com and the operations manager is Richard.attwood@ssp.uk.com
The chief executive of SSP is kate.swann@ssp.uk.com so feel free to send them all a message if you are not happy about this. It is a waste of time harassing their underpaid minions at point of sale because they are just doing their job enforcing the nonsensical rules their manager insists upon.
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I’m unsurprised, SSP is the worst of the big airport/train food operators. I dread going through MSP when hungry, for example, because it’s almost all SSP (except Starbucks which is HMSHost - HMSHost are no saints, but compared to the SSP-owned food court they seem like they are!)
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We finally know the cause of crashing terminals! 
As I’m sure many of you are aware, the problem seems to be exclusive to Verifone terminals. After reaching out to a merchant who has been refusing our cards due to crashing, we were put in touch with the company that provided them with their EPOS and terminal system. Myself and @Anthony (Head of Card Ops) managed to visit their site and conduct some tests.
Luckily, we managed to replicate the issue, crashing a terminal and causing it to get stuck in a loop of printing receipts. It was only after returning to the office that we realised the offline PIN was blocked on the card that caused the crash. After the initial panic that we had wasted a whole day by testing a blocked card, we started to piece it all together… What if blocked offline PINs are causing terminals to crash?
Armed with this new hypothesis, we blocked our offline PINs and made our way to London Bridge station. We immediately spotted a suspect terminal in Upper Crust, where we (very suspiciously) started buying individual snacks - making notes after each transaction. We managed to narrow down the crashing to prepaid cards with blocked offline PINs.
We reported this to Verifone, who then ran some tests on a staff member’s card. They managed to replicate the problem last week. Yesterday, they got back to us with an explanation:
There is a bug in the way some of their terminals deal with processing declines on online-only cards.
This is good news, it means that only declined prepaid cards are causing some Verifone terminals to crash. It also means that our cards are not specifically to blame. As we roll out our new online preferring debit cards, these problems should become a thing of the past.
The crazy thing is that merchants were declining enough Monzo cards to link them to their terminals crashing!
We now plan to work with Verifone on a workaround for merchants until there is a permanent solution. I will be sure to keep everyone updated on our progress
Thanks for everyone’s help on this! As usual, the community input has been phenomenal 
Please let us know if there are any more merchants refusing our cards!
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How does the offline PIN get blocked?
Entering your PIN incorrectly 3 times on an offline terminal
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Does this apply to the issues with Verifone terminals and Current Account contactless?
(Ie. with train ticket machines)
The stations around here are big fans of announcements proclaiming “If you see something suspicious, please report it to a member of the station staff or British transport police immediately. See It. Say It. Sorted.”
I can just see some overzealous person going to a policeman “Excuse me officer, there are two blokes over there acting suspiciously, they keep buying overpriced baguettes”
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@Louis.cox Good work…
Will Verifone now push updates and also inform said companies of the fix and to stop refusing cards?
Not where I thought that was going. I figured the suspect Verifone terminal would be the something suspicious to report
Very interesting - one more question if you can disclose it, is this a contact or a contactless problem? E.g. is this happening when the terminal attempts to move on to signature (since it’s after both offline PIN modes in your CVM list) for a contact transaction, or is it happening for contactless if the PIN try counter is 0 on the card?
Either way, a crash is never good behaviour, it just makes me wonder, if it’s the former if they may have issues with foreign cards as well? I kind of want to take a US-issued chip and signature card there and see if it crashes the terminal 
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The train ticket machine crash seems to be a separate issue. We actually visited the manufacturer’s site to do some testing not too long ago and we are waiting to hear back on the results. The working hypothesis is that it’s a software issue - newer machines from the same manufacturer seem to work just fine.
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I have to say the man at the checkout was very confused by our behaviour - especially how excited we got when the machine crashed
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