I am banging my head against the wall with support at the moment trying to get them to cancel a continuous payment authority a company has on my debit card.
It seems that Monzo don’t have the facility to cancel these and are reluctant to even admit they exist.
I have spoken to two support agents and it has been escalated to a specialist they all keep avoiding the request and saying that they cant see any future payments at the moment and to wait until there is an unauthorized payment taken and then contact them again.
Which is both ludicrous and against FCA regulations:
Does anyone know how I can get Monzo to do this or is this one or them situations where because they are a new bank and use emojis they don’t follow the same procedures as the big banks?
I’m really sorry to hear about this. If you don’t mind, I’d like to look into what’s happened, so I’ll send you a DM to get some details.
For the record, we absolutely do have a system in place to deal with this - We can block any merchant from taking a CPA from our support back-end. Alternatively, one quick way of stopping it is to simply replace your card in the app, as the merchant then won’t have the correct details.
The third sentence of the original post states it best;
“We’ll send a message to Mastercard, which some merchants (such as Spotify) will use to update your subscriptions. Not all merchants understand this message though!”
From my understanding, a CPA is a horrible mess of a feature that needs to die in a corner somewhere. I have a lot of sympathy with the banks over these since it needs the full-on sledge hammer of banning all transactions with a specific merchant to crack these particular nuts.
In my personal utopia, whatever system is put in place to replace them should involved registering something with the bank that the customer has the right to revoke like a Direct Debit mandate.
Not sure if it answers your question per se, but I had a question an age ago about how a CPA is ‘presented’ to Monzo (i.e. does it appear different to a card transaction) this is what Simon B said:
I’m sure it’s way more nuanced but it does sound like CPAs are a PITA for everyone.
If that’s the case, why don’t you? Time and Time again people post about these issues. I too have encountered numerous problems trying to resolve this very issue after being a victim of fraud. Clearly a training issue.
CPAs do not exist in the card payments world as a technical thing. It is purely a regulatory term. There is no reliable way for us to tell two different subscriptions from the same merchant on the same card apart, unlike with Direct Debits where multiple different “instructions” can be set up on the same account.
My hearsay understanding seems to align with reality then.
The ‘company’ has permission to repeatedly charge the card.
They record that permission for themselves.
The bank has no record of anything.
This means:
there is nothing for a bank to ‘Cancel’ so CPA advice is always to deal with the company where possible.
If absolutely necessary (i.e. where we insist on telling the bank to cancel something that doesn’t exist) all that can be done is blocking all transactions with that company.
As I said above, I think this needs to die in a ditch and be replaced with some sort of actual payment authority lodged with the bank itself. (Yay! More administration…)
Hello Simon, I’ve had the same problem this evening, trying to cancel a CPA. Your advisors told me twice to contact the company involved. I’ve ended up just ending the chat & ordering a new card as I was frustrated, which I understand will stop the payments coming out? Thank you
That’s correct - CPA’s are based on the merchant having a record of your card PAN (16 digit number) - Therefore, if that PAN is no longer active they won’t be able to collect a payment.
In the future, we’ll be exploring other possibilities that might help in these scenarios, particularly for online merchants.
The most reliable way to cancel a CPA is to simply replace your card - all future authorizations will then decline. Of course, if you have things like ABU turned on depending on what you replace your card for the new details may be substituted by the merchant - Netflix do this reliably. Google less reliably.
Otherwise, we can block merchants on our end and this is done using a Mastercard service (the acronym for which I’ve temporarily forgotten) for various reasons. There is a cost incurred for us but it’s reliable, unless the merchant switches to charging you under a different identifier - but that is against the rules.
here you go;