It’s totally legal I understand. But while that is the letter of the law if you got into serious issues due to something and took it to court it would be easily said that the common man would assume XYZ and win the case. The law isn’t black and white in practice.
It wasn’t credited. That’s just how Monzo shows it. The authorisation hold just fell off as presentment has been delayed. I’ve got a handful of them, too.
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In principle but big firms have big legal teams and will keep disputing any ruling and it will get re-judged at a higher court higher and higher up the tree. They may win and as you lose you may have to pay their costs, or you may win and perhaps have to bear your own costs. Having taken a case to the high court in the strand I would say you need to be able to lose in excess of £10,000-15,000 of legal fees if you want to fight it that far.
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I understand what it is but this is something Monzo need to plan for given they give better access to what’s going on than legacy banks.
Fact is that I probably at the least should have a notification to say they are aware that this is happening and to check any refunds you might have received recently.
I know of one person who just thought that she got a refund. I had to tell her not to spend it. Yes, I wouldn’t have been like that but it’s a fact that people can be stupid with money and it would be useful for Monzo to let people know.
It’s a downside to the overall greatness that instant notifications have.
I would then equally argue Amex should have emailed me to say they are aware that this has happened and to prepare for it to be debited again.
To me this is all about being a responsible company and not relying on the technical letter of the law.
Debited again? It hasn’t been debited once yet. Monzo just plays pretend. I love Monzo but this is the one thing I don’t like. It won’t change because most customers love it, and Monzo is so amazing I can deal with one slightly irritating thing 
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This is what happens when modern banks meet antiquated processes. Would we design a double entry system of authorisation and presentment now? Doubtful.
One of the things I’m most looking forward to is Monzo (and Starling, N26 and the rest) becoming big enough to influence downstream infrastructure and lead a rethink of some of this stuff…
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Exactly this.
I’m not quite old enough (nearly though) to remember the times when a merchant would phone the bank to check you had enough credit to make a payment with your credit card, and maybe the bank made a note of this so they had an idea of your balance should another merchant then call up to ask the same question.
It made sense then, but it doesn’t now.
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Oooh, I’d like that! We could toggle it on and off in the settings. Only joking, if they can’t manage a PIN on an app they couldn’t cope with double entry bookkeeping 
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Yes but for all intents and purposes it has done. Let’s not hide behind the technical terminology.
I had the money.
The money left my account spending.
It returned and was able to be spent.
It will then be again unavailable to spend soon.
I’m not doubting the backend stuff but it’s very dangerous to not acknowledge that with the benefit of showing payments in this instant way come the responsibility to cater for situations where it can be detrimental to your customers.
Simply “but it hasn’t actually been debited” is not good enough.
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That’s just an implementation detail - users shouldn’t know nor care about them.
As far as the user is concerned they paid and then got their money back due to the merchant’s acquirer’s fault. Those idiots should be on the hook for the bill, not the users.
It’s like paying for something in cash and then being asked to pay again because the till got robbed - how is that the responsibility of the user? They already paid.
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I was sort of with you, until this point. This analogy is certainly wrong, because in your case the customer would actually pay double. But that’s not the case here, as the first “payment” is “refunded”.
If you wish to make a “robbery analogy”, then it’s more like someone robbing the till, then handing you your money back, and the retailer asking you a few weeks later to return them the money that’s rightfully theirs.
It is, really, a problem with Monzo and similar banks pretending that an authorisation is a payment, when it is in fact not. Ultimately, I start seeing this as more and more of a problem…
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Yes, this is exactly right. At the end of the day Monzo does accounting the same as every other bank, but if they present things differently to their users then they are going to come across these awkward situations. Most of the time it works fine, but when it goes wrong…
It shouldn’t be beyond Monzo to show pending transactions more obviously, and if the merchant doesn’t make a presentment before the authorisation times out it should be possible to show the “refund” with a message explaining that the merchant is still entitled to take this amount from your account.
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I’d go one step further and request an option to “remove” that amount from your spending balance for when the merchant requests it.
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We’ve had this before:
Also, see this post a bit further up which really explains the situation very well …
Yes, why not. Maybe to a “pot” from where it can automatically be retrieved when the merchant requests payment. Some will say this is just complicating things, but different people have different relationships with money, and providing a variety of options is possibly the best way to keep more people happy with their money management.
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I get what you are saying, but there is a tendency here to go into the “technical” side of things and ignore the end-user experience.
A customer does not know, and really doesn’t need to know, the ins-and-outs of how this works - like I said above, they only see money removed from their accounts, added back, and removed again.
If you are going to show them this in the way this situation has come around, you need to prepare for it and ensure that nobody is left out of pocket. If Monzo want to be a billion strong (!!) then they absolutely need to nail this sort of thing.
I’m not disagreeing with you 
just cross-referencing Monzo’s previous response to this suggestion
Incidentally, though, I don’t think it’s easy to solve: The problem is that in most cases where authorisations “time out” (at least in most cases that I have experienced) they “time out” on purpose: The merchant never intends to collect the money. (e.g. active card checks, hotel deposits, pay at pump “reservations”, etc). Thus, accompanying each time out with a “the merchant can still collect the money” message isn’t gonna be good UX either (and will lead to “warning fatigue”).
So, if we assume that we can’t change mastercard’s systems and procedures, then I don’t think there is too much that Monzo can actually do on their own.
In an ideal world I’d like to see authorisations having a maximum time line: Give the merchant 7 days to collect the money, and if they don’t: 
But I don’t think that’s gonna happen any time soon.
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I’d like authorisations to have a maximum of 24 hours time, but they can be refreshed for up to 28 days - so the merchant has got to show ‘intent’ to take it everyday but can reserve the funds until the product is shipped.
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Meh. I’d like authorisations to not exist except in special circumstances like hotels.
These days all merchants are online. The transfer to their account can happen instantly. There’s zero reason for it to be delayed randomly by two weeks.
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Agreed!