Speed up refunds on pending "authorization holds"

Feedback & Ideas
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Update: I just got the final reply from the customer advocacy team. It’s a 7 page PDF file titled “Our final response: We’re unable to uphold your complaint”.

Nothing new in the document. It gives an explanation about how authorisation works and then states that everything that has happened is the merchants + Mastecard fault. From Monzo’s point of view they are following proper procedure and there’s nothing else to do. There’s a note about why they needed evidence from me to be able to do anything, a note about being glad to have arranged for my money to be reimbursed early, and then some reinforcement about how there’s nothing else that they can do. Further available options are to reopen the complaint or contact the Ombudsman.

They completely missed the point about figuring out the technical root cause (so that I could at least pressure Uber). There’s nothing about the process taking 30 days for some people . There’s nothing about Monzo’s horrible manual experience to claim back money for this sort of thing. Nothing about the fact that several other users and me are having very inconsistent experiences and shown different options while trying to claim back money using Monzo’s App. Nothing about this kind of issue happening consistently to some people while not happening at all to others. And they didn’t share any details about any sort of technical investigation on their side.

Frankly, I’m not sure if it’s worth to pursue the issue any further through usual channels. My sincere advice for anyone using Monzo to pay for anything that may be subject to pre-authotisation is:

With Monzo there’s always a chance that authorisation money will be withheld for 30 days. Claiming back your money before 30 days is a chore. Monzo doesn’t officially recognize that there’s anything wrong happening. So, honestly, the pragmatic option is to just pay with something else. NatWest Debit Card has always worked well for me. A Credit Card is a good option as well. Lucky or unlucky, fair or unfair, in my specific case every payment method other than Monzo has always worked flawlessly with Uber.

Unfortunately this also means that, at least for now, I can’t get rid of my “traditional” bank account. Meaning that, as much as I like Monzo’s App, I’ll be using my Monzo account less and, consequently, Monzo will be processing less transactions and dealing with much smaller deposits on my side.
I’ll also be reviewing if I really need Monzo Premium and Monzo Business Pro. Again, not because I dislike Monzo, but because if I’m not going to be using Monzo as my main account, then most of the Premium benefits no longer make much sense.
It’s unfortunate, I really, really like Monzo’s overall experience and want to promote Monzo from a casual spending account to my main Bank. It feels like Monzo is almost there until you hit this sort of issue… Maybe in a couple of years?

Regardless of what happened in official channels. I’m still available if any insiders with a technical background want to get involved.

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Inevitable outcome really. It is and always was an Uber issue.

The ombudsman will be of no help either. No one is going to force some tech deep dive into Ubers payment system. Monzo abided by banking regulation here, they held the auth as they are supposed to and reversed it on request. Forcing some kind of tech investigation just isn’t what the banking complaints procedure is for.

I did warn you that it would be a waste of everyone’s time…

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116

You did :slight_smile:. Well, regardless of my own frustrating experience (as a very curious person trying to look under the hood), I don’t think that it was a complete waste of time. I haven’t really lost any money, and you all couldn’t hear me cursing like a sailor behind my monitor. From a community perspective, there’s now much more information about the issue available to end users. Everyone affected can Google it and find some great posts from @Dan5, @erincandescent, @N26throwaway, etc. Maybe this will help other people make sense of what’s happening.
And ultimately a verified outcome (obvious from the start or not) is always another data point for decision makers. End users and Monzo alike.

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117

You wasn’t ever going to get the response you was looking for tbf. Case closed :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye::sweat_smile:

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118

Can’t fix something that isn’t broken.

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119

Plenty of evidence of how everything “isn’t broken” in this thread. Including your own experience with a vending machine.

But sure, withhelding money for 30 days is… A feature.

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121

The merchant pinky swears it doesn’t take 30 days.
Only happens to me when I’m using Monzo. No evidence one way or the other.

:person_shrugging:

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122

Unfortunately as previously mentioned we don’t choose how long the auth holds last for.

It’s either 7 or 30. Sometimes we can get them back early sometimes we can’t it’s set by Mastercard and/or the merchant like @Dan5 mentioned way up in the thread.

Sorry we couldn’t change that :pensive:

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123

A CS rep on a phone who doesn’t have the slightest clue how they do their payment processing isn’t going to be the best source of information.

They more or less always blame the bank even when it’s clearly the merchant at fault. Alas this leads to people believing things like refunds take 7/14/30 days when the merchant could make them happen in seconds if they wanted to.

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124

I’d put it to you that it isn’t quite that simple, for example we’ve had transactions where it was declined by the bank but the auth is still pending (I work for a merchant now), people will angrily call us demanding the money but I can see the messaging queue and it’s absolutely a bank-side problem. We can’t reverse a declined transaction. Of course I can send the customer the decline receipt and a screenshot of the messaging queue instantly - that’s how you know we are a good merchant :smiling_face: Some banks (looking at you NatWest) are still unable to reverse the auth manually though and/or don’t understand they need to.

Also obviously settled transactions aren’t instantly refunded. That’s another thing that frustrates customers. But a decent CS team will be able to send you decline receipts / refund receipts etc to show they’ve done their side before talking to the bank. And they won’t make up rubbish about how long a hanging auth takes to auto reverse etc because that’s nothing to do with the merchant.

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125

You are right. And I hope that you agree that the same also applies to Monzo and Mastercard.

Unfortunately, since there’s no law that would let me inspect the transactions myself, it’s impossible to troubleshoot what has really happened without going through CS and finding a way to bypass gatekeepers.

This! I mean, It’s likely that one (or many) of the payment processors used by Uber is dropping the ball as per @erincandescent hypothesis. But without a technical investigation there’s no way to tell one way or another.

Assuming that the “faulty payment processor” hypothesis is correct; I think that if we could reach the right folk with proof of what is happening the issue could be easily fixed. Ultimately I don’t think that Monzo, Mastercard or Uber wants to purposely upset customers and lose business.
Actually, if I had an example of the Mastercard messages for one successful “instant” refund as well as my own broken flow I’m pretty confident that I could reach out to the right people at Uber (through non-official channels), and on their side they could identify and reach out to the payment processor and get them to fix the issue. Monzo, Mastercard, Uber and Uber’s payment processores are all making some money every time that I pay with Monzo’s Debit Card anyway.

Still, for all of this to happen, I would have to get Monzo to extract the mentioned messages from their logs. This requires someone from engineering taking an interest.

Top notch CS could act as a bridge towards the top notch technical folk. They would help investigate and troubleshoot the issue regardless of where the root cause of the problem is (and who is responsible for fixing it).

To make something clear to Monzo Customer Support, Monzo crowdfunding folk and some of the regulars with the annoying “there’s nothing to see here” attitude. Most users will not be as vocal as me. Frankly, being vocal about something when a lot of people are trying their best not to get what you are saying can be very tiresome. It’s much easier to just cancel your account and take your business somewhere else. And when things go wrong, this is exactly what the average Joe will do: They will cancel their paid Monzo account, they will stop using their debit card to pay for anything vital (meaning less “swipe” fees for Monzo) and they will keep less money parked in their Monzo account. They may even close their account permanently and just move to one of Monzo’s many competitors.

Bad customer experience ultimately impacts Monzo’s bottom line. And failing to properly investigate an existing issue is bad customer experience.

There’s nothing to win by shutting down clients coming to Monzo with real issues (and having your money on hold for 30 days is a real issue). There’s nothing to win by not admitting that a suboptimal experience is suboptimal. There’s a lot to be won by collaborating with clients and merchants.

Regardless of who’s ultimately responsible for fixing the issue, stellar customer experience implies going the extra mile to help the client. Other than Dan’s offer to investigate the issue on his own account (which is absolutely amazing, but, honestly, Dan5 alone gets full credit for it), in my book Monzo and Uber are pretty much playing the same game.

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But there is nothing to see here. Monzo are not lying to you. Other customers might come across the same issue but they might not need the same thing repeating to them.

Writing war and peace every time someone doesn’t give you the answer you want isn’t going to change anything.

You’ve stopped paying for various Monzo products now because Uber don’t do as they should. As has been the case from the start, you’re blaming the wrong side.

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127

I don’t think ‘technical investigation’ is exactly what you need for this. Frontline customer support should be able to see that. As above in the thread I understand Monzo COps already can.

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128

Yes, there is. Transactions are taking 30 days to be refunded. Monzo’s manual refunding process is horrible.

I’ve stopped paying (actually, for now I only downgraded to Plus and cancelled Monzo Business Pro) because I can’t use Monzo for one of my most common use cases.

I can’t stop using Uber. I can stop using Monzo.

There’s no blame to be assigned. There’s an investigation that should have been done.
There’s also opaqueness, deflection and redirection.

The TL;DR of War and Peace is: “CS, investors, and fanboys: Stop denying the issue. I don’t need you to come to Monzo’s defense, I need some logs”.

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If they can it’s even worse. I certainly didn’t get the info that I needed, and I was given wrong info many times.

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And again, you prove my point. Resorting to name calling because people aren’t telling you you’re right, when you’re clearly wrong. I’m not sure how many times you need to hear the same thing.

No wonder support started trying to get rid of you!

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131

You were told that Uber hadn’t reversed the auth right? That’s all you needed to know?

I think you just didn’t like the answer as far as I can see.

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I’m sorry if I have offended you, I’m sure that you are trying to be helpful. It’s ok and very understandable if you decide to refrain from posting in this thread.

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Everyone has tried to be helpful, but until someone says “This is Monzo’s fault. Have your money back instantly and if that fails, press this button” you’re not going to be satisfied.

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I was told by Monzo that Uber didn’t reverse the Auth. I was told by Uber that the Auth was reversed but it sometimes takes a while to process.

It’s not that I don’t like the answer. Is that none of the two answers helps me to fix the issue.

You know what would help? Transaction logs.

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