Be good to be able to turn it on/off or maybe even set a threshold.
Personally, I don’t find the notifications annoying but even if I did, having used Monzo’s app for almost half a year now though, I would never switch them off…
Here’s a few reasons why -
TL;DR - spotting fraudulent transactions / that your card’s been stolen, realising that a payment’s been delayed or that a delayed payment’s been taken, seeing that you’ve been double charged / charged the wrong amount, while you can still do something about it.
Lets say you signed up for a mobile money transfer service that enables you to send money to others, as long as you know their mobile number. Then you’re charged 1p for a transaction - which will fall under your threshold for the minimum payment that you want to receive notifications for - & once the fraudster has identified your account & that the account has funds in it, they take another £100.
If you had notifications switched on, you would had the chance to freeze your card, after that 1p transaction that you weren’t expecting, to a merchant / recipient you didn’t recognise & you’d have avoided the hassle of going overdrawn & potentially having direct debits fail or at least having to request that money back from Monzo.
The above happened to me in my legacy bank account & I’d hope to avoid having it happen again if possible.
You’d potentially have a similar issue if someone had stolen your card & didn’t realise it - if the contactless payments the thief was making were small (& they may make sure they were - if a threshold was introduced, people would hear about it) or notifications were switched off, you wouldn’t know to freeze your card.
It’s also useful not to receive notifications while they’re switched on, if you place an order with Amazon for the first time for example, when you don’t receive the notification you realise that the payments going to be delayed and that you need to keep the funds in your account.
Or to receive a notification about the TFL transaction from 2/3/12 days ago that’s suddenly lowered your account balance.
There’s a few examples like this in the @MonzoLoveTweets feed -
you could see that in the list of transactions in the app of course but it’s easier to spot, sooner, from the notifications.
So although Monzo might add this feature at some point, I’d encourage other users to think about those examples (& I’m sure there’s others too), before they use it…
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Thats about how Monzo choose to handle fraud, not notifications isn’t it ? I don’t consider it my job to spot fraud attempts (of course it is my job, to take reasonable precautions, with card and linked device).
Hopefully Suspicious activity notification will help in terms of spotting fraud, without having unnecessary notifications.
One thing which is very attractive about Monzo is the API and the fact it will post to form or similar, so users may be observing the notifications but handling them out of app or even device
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