Unlocking your own Monzo Pot 🔓

[Rat_au_van (Em)]

Wow Thanks. No wonder it needed changing. That’s a lot of unnecessary work for COps

[NeilM (NM)]

Question: How was this not predicted… Its kinda obvious

[Rat_au_van (Em)]

Think you’d expect a certain % but 20% is a huge number

[AdamSee]

As an alternative if you have over £1000 and investec savings pot, it takes 2 working days for that money to get back into your bank account and you earn interest. Good friction and an interest reward, too

[NeilM (NM)]

I get that but it is basic human psychology

Stanford marshmallow experiment

What would be interesting would be to get some of those who unlocked their pots early to ask why but also do a similar experiment as I think it shows a lot in terms of spending habit and attitude to money

[Chapuys (Kevyn)]

You could turn that 20% on its head and say they are very successful because 80% of locked pots stay locked, helping people to save and not impulse spend. 93.5% of queries last week were not even related to unlocking pots.

[Dannytc]

A GPS location locked pot is my “wish”. Only place I can unlock is if I’m stood on the top of that big hill in town or even Snowdon

Alternatively, a staggered unlock, I have to remember to press unlock three days in a row, third day it unlocks. Give me three times I have to think “do I really need this early”.

[thomastte]

Damn. Hate that this is available.
I think a cool down period that you could set per pot would be nice. Defaulting to 24 hours that can be adjusted when locking the pot.

[Chapuys (Kevyn)]

This reminds me when I opened a ISA in a passbook account in a Welsh only building society 50-odd miles away to help me save

[Ordog]

Im trying to think of a way of having someone authorise your early unlock.

For example if you have a joint account you could ask your partner to authorise the early unlock. You’d have to discuss the reason you created the pot and why you wanted it unlocking. They could determine if it really is important.

It follows on from what @Chapuys said above because I did similar when saving for my house deposit. Then for an additional layer I gave my withdrawal book to my parents on the condition they only gave it me if it was really important.

Kinda like on Facebook where you can nominate close friends to give you access back to your account if you’re locked out.

Edit: How about when you lock a pot you’re given an early unlock code. You can then give that to someone to look after with condtions

[Simoore2]

Sounds good in theory but in a situation where I need money desperately, I.e. the sory of situation where i would unlock a pot, I’d probably want access instantly

[anon51649695]

Put it into a proper saving account, like a virgin money fixed isa 1.61% or similar
https://uk.virginmoney.com/savings/find/results/online
You can take it out but you’ll lose three months interest. That’s a good incentive not to dip into it

I was quite short sighted to introduce a system that needed so much staff attention. Especially as they grow and you take into account price’s law.
https://brainlid.org/general/2017/11/28/price-law.html

[Chalky (Daniel White)]

I’ll just echo that I think this is a bad idea. What’s the point in having a ‘locked’ pot if all you have to do is press one extra button to unlock it? Something like the Gambling Block probably needs to happen?

Perhaps more emphasis should go into explaining exactly what a locked pot is for before allowing people to lock them in the first place. The thread a few weeks ago demonstrates that some people really don’t get it. Personally I can’t understand how you can’t ‘get it’ but clearly there’s enough people out there that don’t!

[Juggy69]

Yep 24/48hr unlock like the gambling block

[Rat_au_van (Em)]

You could still keep the COps route but if you can release it yourself with24 hours notice it should cut down the numbers who need to. Shouldn’t be locking a pot that contains all your emergency money though

[anon51649695]

I think for some, “emergency” means - need money to go out on the lash on a Friday night

[aslater (Andy Slater)]

Unlock it yourself but it takes 24 hours to release the funds back to your account

This, but you set the wait period when you create the pot, then you decide how much friction to apply to your own pot

[adam.williams]

@BethS

Just found this

Last week Locked Pots accounted for 6.5% of our total inbound.

As someone interested in the stats:

• Do you track average resolution time for each “type” of request?
• if you were to weight the total inbound stats such that you had a breakdown by percentage-of-requests*avg-time-to-resolve for each type, would locked pots still represent a high proportion of the COp workload?

My point is, it’s not very meaningful to know you get very few “I want to initiate a chargeback” requests if these are each significantly more taxing than other queries you might receive in terms of the time required to resolve them.

[BethS]

It was equivalent to almost 5 FTE COps and is/was growing 15-20% week on week.

[awjdean]

If getting COps to unlock pots early is too expensive, there definitely still needs to be more friction, when unlocking a pot early, than just an extra message otherwise the pot isn’t really locked.

Alternative options to COps unlocking pots

• Customisable delay for early release of funds (up to 48 hours).

• Option to put money up as collateral. If you unlock the pot early, Monzo gets the money.

Ideas to discourage people from unlocking their pots early

• To unlock the pot you have to delete it - makes it more difficult for people unlocking to “dip into the pot”.

• Pots can be unlocked with no delay up to one hour from being locked - helps people who accidentally lock a pot or accidentally lock a pot for the wrong amount of time.