What you really need is Uber to do as they should. I can’t imagine a button to solve this will get added when its an external and seemingly rare situation.
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I get the same screen as @Carlo1460 posted for Uber Eats in a pending stage.
It’s unhelpful and makes it your problem for 14 days.
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“Seemingly” → How many more people need to report the problem before it can be considered a seemingly common situation?
Interesting, I get a totally different screen from Uber. There are some options, but they are all pointless as on their side they are already pointing out that I’ve been charged 0.
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Oh this is a Monzo screen.
Go to the transaction and select “Something wrong?” at the bottom then that screen comes up.
They are all still pointless, though. The first one because I’ve already done that; the second because I’m in 14 day limbo; the third because it’s not relevant.
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Thousands probably, and it’s not something that’s affecting everyone either.
Hopefully there’s a solution to it that fixes it for everyone but I doubt a button to request a pending is reversed is ever going to happen.
@Carlo1460 , since this is a Monzo screen, any idea on why the option is not enabled for me?
You can just click the Help? on the main screen, type; ‘Contacting Support’ and raise a dispute that way with an advisor.
@a.accioly
Look at the numbers of customers Monzo have, then look at how many complaints are coming through. I don’t see many people in this forum posting, from looking at social media, I can’t see much. So I’m guessing we’re looking at less than 0.05% of customers
Well, the original request is: Give me a way to have my refunds faster. 100% automatic would be even better :).
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Is the difference in screens because one of you is looking at a pending and the other a settled transaction?
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I think (but am not sure) there used to be a button to press to get the money reversed immediately.
Sadly, I suspect it was misused.
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Pending doesn’t give me the other options to raise a dispute about not received a service etc etc, settled does
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There was, but it got taken away. I used to see it a lot when looking at Tesco transactions (back when Tesco had a lot of problems processing Monzo payments), and of course the one time I actually wanted to use it was just after they’d take it away 
Can’t remember if it was in a ‘live’ chat or here on the community where a Monzo staff member confirmed to me that they had to take it away because too many people were using it to reverse payments that the merchant then claimed the money for.
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I cant help but think that if we had better visibility over the difference between your cleared balance and your pending one, a lot of this would go away…
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Or it would increase dramatically.
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Let me tell you why I think, with sympathetic design, that wouldn’t be the case.
Other banks don’t have this issue. That’s because they tend to only change balances when funds clear.
Monzo is great that it’s real time. But the card payment systems really screw that up.
Monzo will treat the money being held as yours for interest and overdraft purposes until it’s collected. But that just isn’t clear. And you can’t see how much you can go overdrawn by without incurring interest.
It’s really not at all customer friendly. To the point where even staff don’t really know how it all works.
It’s hard work to make it all simple. But that’s what Monzo is good at.
They just need to think deeply about some of the core banking designs and how to maximise utility there.
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But they do. People always want to know why the figures differ
If I have £500 in my account and I spend £50 today at ASOS. I want my balance to show £450, that’s the amount of money I have.
£500 and £450 available just confuses (most) people.
I don’t care that the £50 is pending, I don’t need my account to update when it’s cleared, it’s spent.
Cases like these make it more complex but overall I think Monzo has the far better system. The advantage Monzo would have for it being “confusing” as I’d be able to see that ASOS payment instantly, whereas in the old days you just see the £50 variance and might not remember what/why.
We’re also in the tiny tiny minority that understand how these things work, most people don’t realise a transaction is pending for days afterwards.
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I have done this long ago. @Carlo1460 was mentioning a different option that isn’t available for me. Why?
Just to clarify so that the subject of single balance vs separate balance for pending transactions doesn’t get mixed with the problem.
Despite the way NatWest works, with NatWest my pending transactions are refunded “instantly”; exactly as they are for a lot of Monzo users.
To be 100% pedantic, here’s how it works with NatWest:
- I book a trip with Uber
- Uber charges an authorisation hold
- NatWest displays a new pending transaction
- The trip is either completed or cancelled
- NatWest cancels the pending transaction and optionally shows a new transaction (i.e., how much I was charged for the trip).
I never had a Uber fare transaction in pending state with NatWest for longer than a few minutes (and I’m talking about several hundred fares overall).
I did get a couple of Uber Eats transactions pending, which are generally refunded in a couple of days, but this is not what I’m talking about.
So, just to be as clear as I can be:
- My problem is simple in nature. Authorisation holds are taking 30 days to get refunded
- Uber may or may not be to blame, but there’s no dancing around the fact that It only ever happens to me when I pay with Monzo.
- Some people are having the same problem consistently, some are having the same problem sporadically, some are not having any problems at all. The problem still exists.
- To have to contact customer support every time so that I can get the money refunded faster is not an acceptable solution.
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