If you’re adamant it’s a problem between Uber and Monzo, I’d be more inclined to stick to paying with your NatWest card to remove this issue going forward.
It’s not a problem or bug or issue here, it’s a Mastercard process therefore unable to resolve it the way you’d like other than following the disputed process via live chat, and then going forward use another card.
I will indeed avoid paying for Uber trips with Monzo.
But I really hope that the official answer from Monzo support isn’t “just pay with something else”.
No, I generally speak for myself not Monzo 
For someone to get what you are saying we need engineering. As you have already pointed out, Customer Support is stuck in the “LOL. It’s not an issue [random emoji], it’s just how it works. Because I said so!” loop. This isn’t great at all.
Well, I’ll leave this “Enhancement request” open. Let’s see if it gets enough attention and upvotes.
Oh boy, I would love to have write access to Monzo’s internal issue tracker for a day :).
Dan has given you a thorough explanation though.
This is a problem the staff face. Dan & Carlo have responded but it’s not the answer that is wanted so it resorts to mocking. Which is why we have less staff engagement these days.
And I have politely replied back to him.
(…)
Anyway, I’m not pressing the matter here any further.
There’s more than enough information in this thread if Monzo ever decides to investigate. For now I’ll just refrain from using Monzo with Uber.
I agree that there is an issue with staff engagement here. And the way that some staff are treated is not great. But I don’t think I’ve seen any mocking in this topic?
More generally, I think a problem we have around these parts is that there’s a tendency from some people to dismiss things by just saying that that’s the way it is. Or, to use @N26throwaway’s phrasing, to tell them they’re ‘holding it the wrong way’. Now, that can be helpful if you’re looking for a workaround (although quite often those topics get brushed aside with a ‘that’s been asked before’) but not if you’re trying to highlight an issue that you think it’d be in Monzo or its users best interest to fix. Or if you’re thinking about new stuff.
This place, I think, thrives when people can both engage with the subject matter at hand and think about how they’d like things to be rather than how they are at the moment. To do that does take some skill, but I still think and hope it’s possible.
I have no idea on the actual issue. I’ve only used Uber a handful of times. I definitely had one that I had a hold and cancelled but this was nearly a year ago and I can’t remember if that was ApplePay or not.
Something is amiss somewhere clearly.
@Revels, I didn’t mean to offend. But the quotes are public, and they do contain emojis.
Anyway, let me… Well, stop posting.
I read that as expressing dissatisfaction with support in the app - no names were mentioned.
Whereas I read your charge of mocking, and linking it to Monzonauts on here, as a suggestion that someone had been rude to Dan or Carl.
I’m sorry if I misread either of those.
I think this is the important point to get to.
There definitely seems to be inconsistencies in how these things work. It seems like it’s on the Monzo side: @a.accioly has had an inconsistent experience between Monzo and Natwest; his experience is inconsistent with @_Tom’s; @N26throwaway has had a bad experience of Monzo support not understanding how their payment systems work (and so have I).
That’s not to fling mud: I think all anyone wants to do here is to help make Monzo better. Let’s hope they let us. 
As above the most simple explanation is that their payment processor isn’t sending it on all cards. Maybe it doesn’t know it has the card details or something there is telling it the card isn’t active / on the system. Or maybe if it’s google pay they are sending it against the tokenised PAN and that’s not being processed, something like that. There’s a tonne of explanations really, as to why they’d fail to send messages to certain cards.
I wonder if a note to the Monzo merchant acceptance email address (acceptance@monzo.com) might help?
It’s not a binary “this merchant doesn’t accept my card” issue, but it’s clearly something that affects a subset of Monzo customers so, whether it’s Uber, its processor or Monzo itself, it reflects on Monzo so they might be motivated to investigate(?)
I don’t feel attacked, honest 
It’s a pretty much circular thread this right now. Literally wait for the response to complaint to come back and then decide if your then take it further.
What ifs, this is how it should work, monzo are at fault, Uber are at fault, it’s getting no where.
Anyways that’s my take on it and I’m off back to bed because I’m grumpy today
I can’t stop posting if I don’t stop posting… I’ll stop posting :).!
But first: The point of the thread is for people to vote for the ability to have this sort of thing dealt with in less than 30 days.
Despite the noise, the ask is independent from what customer support decides to do (or not to do) with my own pending authorisation holds.
Underneath the ask, of course, there’s a more fundamental question of understanding what is actually happening. Then there’s the question of if any business and technical improvements are actually possible. No one but engineering can answer this, and in order to answer it they would first need to investigate what’s going on (and no, neither of these points have been addressed in any depth so far).
I can’t do much more than what I already did for Monzo. Unless they are looking to hire a technical consultant at a fair daily rate :).
There’s been a pretty clear explanation of what should be happening:
If the issue is indeed “Uber haven’t sent this”, then that’s an Uber issue for them to resolve. It could be something as simple as “sometimes there are hiccups adding a card to an account”, which is why others responding have suggested deleting and re adding the card, or using Apple/Google Pay.
If its the case that Uber have sent the message and Monzo haven’t received it, this would be something for Monzo to investigate. From what I know of MasterCard payment systems, this seems unlikely.
I don’t for one minute believe it’s the case that Monzo are receiving the message but choosing to keep the funds ringfenced anyway. There’s no gain to them in doing that, and programming a system to not respond correctly to a message would be more work than having it just do the right thing in the first place.
Occam’s razor says Uber are not always reversing holds properly.
Which is ultimately why:
ultimately isn’t really a voting issue. Monzo are playing to the rules set by MasterCard, it’s not (entirely) by choice that they keep the hold for so long. It’s not a problem when the merchant reverses the hold correctly. But when they don’t? There is risk involved for Monzo in reversing the hold. The biggest one is they lose money. No less big in other ways is that a customer loses money and they’re upset with Monzo for allowing it to happen.
tl;dr, Monzo are playing by MasterCard’s rules, and we can’t really vote to say “don’t play by the rules”.
Now we are really going circular but:
tl;dr, You don’t really know that.
You don’t really know what’s happening and you don’t really know if any rules have to be broken to improve the situation. The only thing that you know is that a certain payment message type exists. Intuition is great, hypothesis are the start of how we gather knowledge, but we aren’t done just because we were able to form a hypothesis. The real work comes next.
There’s a world of complexity in card payment flows. The relationship between the issuer, payment processor and merchant is nowhere as straightforward as it seems, and there’s about a gazillion different ways that a message may disappear in code from any of the 3 parties (Ask me how I know about this)
Again, this is getting nowhere and it will get nowhere without someone from engineering taking an interest.
I’ll try my best not to respond anymore :).
I was going to do that, but so far the advice that I was given was to wait and don’t pay Uber with Monzo. Plus, every experiment on my side can unfortunately lock another £20 or so for 30 days.
It’s not a big issue to me at all (as in, the workaround is just to remain doing what I always did). I’m just very annoying when I want to understand stuff. The issue has been properly raised with support and escalated to the customer advocacy team. Despite the amount of messages here, I’m not sure if it’s really worth to involve the ombudsman, although, if it can help raise the problem to the right people I can try to do it in time.
Frankly, it would be a much better world if everyone was open to entertain such a hypothesis.
Well. That’s it, I’m giving myself a timeout. Mo more posting, at least for the day.
That’s not correct. From the same post I quoted earlier:
This tells us - if Monzo don’t get the auth reversal message, they’re not going to reverse the hold until the holding period expires. From which we can infer that the reverse is also true - if they get the auth reversal message, they will reverse the hold because they know it’s not going to be collected.
As for why they wait 30 days:
(I’m not going to reply to the rest of your post, as I respect that you’re trying to stop posting; I felt it was important to correct the fact that Dan did say more than I quoted originally, meaning we do know more than you made out in your reply.)
I haven’t forgotten this thread - I’m just not back in work until Wednesday and it needs a more complex reply than my phone can handle (I can barely quote a single post, let alone multi quote!!) and I’ll also flag it with the payments to a) sense check what I said and b) that there isn’t something more we can do here.
It would be very, very rare that we would be discarding an 0400 message - but as @N26throwaway suggested - I can’t be 100% certain without looking into the specifics of an account.
There are many various merchants that don’t reliably send 0400 reversal messages - and some of them are pretty large - there have been other instances of this previously posted here.
What I will say is that most of the time when you speak to a customer service agent of a large merchant they a) might be outsourced and not have full access to their systems - so it may just say refunded on their screen and b) may not be fully trained - and again just relying on what they see on their screen.
When you get in touch with us then all our COps can see mastercard messages for a specific transaction and MasterCard messages for a specific card / account. So if any merchant is sending the messages correctly we will see them on our side and be able to spot if something is awry. We can see the RAW data too, incase something is getting lost in translation somewhere.
I don’t work frontline anymore - but I can always look into a specific case, you’ll just need to get in touch via chat and ask them to drop me a DM on Slack (we can’t take direct support requests via the community anymore for data protection reasons). You can always link to either this post or my community profile if the person you’re speaking to doesn’t know who I am - working nights makes you less visible 
