Two Factor Authentication on transactions

[alexs (Alex Sherwood)]

I’ve thought of a few potential problems with this idea, which I’ve listed here -

@alexs

I can see a couple of potential issues with this -

• Merchants like Amazon don’t take the payment when you place an order, they only charge your card when they ship the order. The charge is made before you receive an email notification so you wouldn’t be able to unfreeze the card before the transaction’s blocked.
• If you manage to make an offline transaction I don’t think (I’m not 100% sure) that when the merchant’s terminal goes online to take the payment, the payment will be authorised if your card is frozen. Again, the date / time when that payment will be requested is unpredictable.
• If another Monzo user wants to make a P2P payment to you or a friend wants to pay you using Monzo.me, they wouldn’t be able to while your card was frozen.

given the fact that you will be refunded for any payments that are made fraudulently and that you receive instant notifications & can freeze your card as soon as the first is made, plus you’ll have the added friction of unfreezing the card for every transaction you want to make, this seems like overkill to me.

But there’s nothing stopping users trying it & seeing how many issues this does / doesn’t cause if you do, it would be great to hear how you get on!