I see. But then, I guess it would be no better with a more traditional card - the user would have just never have seen the transaction on their account until it was finally taken months after?
With Monzo, maybe the fact that it get’s refunded would have been an indication that all was not ok? How would these transactions appear in a Monzo feed? Would the original transaction simply disappear or would a new transaction showing the ‘refunded’ amount appear instead? That would be preferable - maybe it would even be worth Monzo flagging these types of ‘refunds’ to give users a heads up there may be an issue.
At the end of the day - the problem was with the merchant in this case, not the customers bank. Always good to see if there are ways Monzo can help in situations unlike traditional banks. It’s likely quite a rare occurrence but worth considering.
I’m not really sure there is a nice way to handle this. Take for example something I encountered recently
I bought a coke from a vending machine in Brussels. A week late the auth expired and the funds were in ringfenced. Now I think technically at any point in the future forever coca cola can just randomly present and collect the funds right?
Not sure there’s a technically feasible way of handling this with how the system works unless auths are never reversed and if they are presentments aren’t allowed to post. Whatever the solution it would require an entirely new payment processing solution which is never going to happen
That would be really, really bad. Far more common than this are authorisations that will never be presented. Any bank that did this would lose all its customers, essentially that would be theft.
Sorry, I should have been clearer. I was trying to imagine an alternate universe version of the card payment network that would have permanent well tracked transactions so that there’d never be this confusion
LOL those are not the real networks of Mastercard/Visa/American Express/Discover/UnionPay/JCB/etc…
Actually, what’s most interesting is how similar all of the above work to each other. Sure, the EMV and track standards are standardised. But things like handling of authorisations and presentments…
The issue is that a lot more merchants are lazy and rely on the auths expiring after a certain period of time instead of explicitly releasing them, so making auths permanent (or last longer) would be very bad.
Look at this thread I made. Now, John Lewis’ general behaviour was unthinkably bad all around (except the very patient and friendly person on the phone - kudos to her!) - the email they sent could have been taken straight out of ‘how to write a phishing message 101’ - but it proves how big of a deal auths can be.
