Two word surnames

Monzo doesn’t seem to cope very well with my two word, unhyphenated surname. When I first ordered my current account card, the debit card came through with just the second word of the surname (I’m guessing the system assumed the first word was a middle name).

Now I have the current account set up, when I transferred money across from First Direct, the payment then showed up in my account as , i.e. missing out the second word of my surname.

This isn’t unique to Monzo (I’ve had similar problems with other providers, either because they can’t cope with a space in a surname, or because they seem to treat one of the names as a middle name). But would be good to understand if this can be sorted.

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It often when there is one field for names rather than separate fields for First name Middle name and Surname. People with a double first name have a similar problem and often have their second part of their first name omitted when it is not hypenated.

In an insurance firm we changed our database to have not only separate fields for the different components of a person’s name but longer field lengths as some foreign names were particularly long and we also came across people with double hyphenated names. A separate, though infrequently used, field was also added where users had a patronymic. Finally a field for suffixes (particularly American clients) where Jr or Sr or III etc were used.

Obligatory link… http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

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There’s more interesting read in this thread (linking to James’ post, but whole thing is worth a read):

@TonyHoyle Very good article, thanks, made me smile! :smiley:

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Yep -I literally had a conversation about a similar thing with the product team this morning. It turned out we were also stripping parts of surnames out of the “preferred name”, so if you were Spanish and your name was Miguel de Cervantes, it would get auto shortened to Miguel Cervantes, and then you’d have an upset customer because his last name is de Cervantes and not Cervantes.

Then some of our developer superstars literally put a fix in place for that today :grinning: Shouldn’t happen moving forward, but there may still be the odd edge case.

For future people reading this topic - if this has happened to you please reach out through the live chat and we’ll fix it :grinning:

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I just applied for a Monzo current account and it wanted to give me the name Nicola E T Davies rather than Thomas-Davies but I got to put my chosen name option instead so that was fine. I’ve become used to receiving letters to Mr Thomas Davies but it is awkward when it’s something official!

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Hey!

Just a pedantic note on how full names are written on the Monzo cards.

I have a two part name, Foo Bar for demonstration here, but my name has been printed as Jonas F Bar. Is this as intended?

Note, maybe I’m being subjected to a character limit?

Thanks,

Jonas

If that’s similar to the length of your name, it isn’t a character limit. Maybe ask them to look at what happened. It seems like it was treated as a middle name, maybe?

Cards do have a character limit on the name but it doesn’t look like your name would have caused this to kick in.

Our engineers are currently working on an extension to the service that prevents common two part names from being split or modified in this way. :slightly_smiling_face:

For now, you can get in touch with support and let us know, we will then be able to override the card name (providing it does fit!) for now. :credit_card:

I was told that the total usable space on the card for embossing first names, possible middle name, and last names is 23 characters including any spaces, apostrophes or hyphens.

Sorry Foo Bar is not representative of my second name, it is in fact longer. More like Jonas A A Fo Barbarbar. So 22 characters total if I can count right. I’d personally argue I’d rather remove the middle name initials if I could choose?

Anywho, I’m not bothered enough to change mine but thought I’d let you know:)

Jonas

Yes. Removing the middle name will help in many circumstances