Situations like these, it gets harder and harder to defend Monzo now we’re several years down the line.
Queries like these, they need to make one of two things happen:
If they want people to request limit raises on the day, then the query needs to be triaged, escalated, and responded to promptly.
If they are unable to respond promptly, it needs to be possible for people to request a raise in advance, or at least the day before.
Reading between the lines, my suspicion is that Monzo’s tooling currently doesn’t allow for limit raises to be buffered (that is, to allow someone to say on day x that the limit should be raised on day x+n). Which means that that for a limit to be raised ‘in advance’, a COp would have to make a note of the customer and their request, and remember to put it through the system on the actual day. This would involve an incredibly high (relatively speaking) risk of human error, and therefore be why Monzo don’t want to offer it as an option.
So either they need to update their tooling to make advance limit raise request possible, or they need to surface any tickets to COps ASAP on the day to ensure that they’re actioned in a timely manner.
If I were in a position to buy a house (ha ha no), my confidence in using Monzo to ‘pay on the day’ would be quite low at this point. I think I’d only use Monzo if I was able to transfer the sum piecemeal to my solicitor in the week(s) leading up to completion day so that the whole sum has been transferred by the day, instead of trying to do one transfer on the day itself.
tl;dr, this process could, and should, be made to work better.
I’m an investor and have been a loyal customer of Monzo’s for over five years. Nevertheless, this issue of not being able to get hold of Monzo when you need to make those rare large payments - or their not acting consistently if you do - remains a major sticking point for me.
I originally raised this over three years ago, and they did eventually announce that they were had developed a process for sorting out such exceptional payments. However, it’s disappointing that this still doesn’t work consistently.
In terms of fully switching my accounts to Monzo, this is a deal breaker. These rare large purchases constitute moments of truth. They’re often already very stressful and loaded with emotion, and not to be able to reliably predict whether Monzo will rise to the occasion makes this much worse. The fact that many customers aren’t even aware of the limits and that Monzo choose not to display them more prominently on payment journeys to increase awareness is another failure.
Monzo, if your customers don’t know whether they can rely on you during such moments of truth, then they can’t rely on you. Please sort this out so it works every time.
I’m full monzo but this does concern me , although I’m not sure what I’m worried about more, Monzo not raising my limits in a timely manner, but I don’t remember anyone saying it hasn’t been raised in time eventually, or my other bank freezing the funds when a large payment comes in and tries to go out quickly.
All these issues are from what I believe to be rare instances where the buyer (for whatever reason) is responsible for transferring the funds on the day.
What normally happens is that you’re given ample time (weeks) to get the money into your solicitors account and they do the transfer on the day. So theoretically you’d have so much time that you could do it in chunks without needing to have your limit raised if you wanted.
This is likely why although there are a few topics about this, they’re few and far between and is likely why Monzo don’t really see it as a huge issue to prioritise resolving.
The process could still be improved by Monzo so it’s not really an excuse. But hopefully this gives a greater understanding and helps ease peoples concerns.
This is my experience exactly, the process with the conveyancer for me started approx 25 days ago, at any point in time I can login to the portal to send funds to them. I actually did that with part of my deposit 2 weeks ago. This week the conveyancer has requested the funds from my LISA which Moneybox have just confirmed will be done by next Thursday.
Once I know what the final figure leaving my LISA is I’ll pay the shortfall on my debit card.
I can’t speak for all conveyancers but surely they are all able to take funds at any point in the process.
There’s also the balance there with the process that can suddenly not move for ages, and move very very quickly all of a sudden.
Due to the chain in our process, we’d been waiting for the chain to sort itself out for a few months, but then had maybe 4 working days notice of the targetted exchange date.
I could have done that in chunks over the two proceeding weeks, but I didn’t want to send money until things were at least confirmed as moving forward.
And even with notice, it’s still something I need to plan in around a very hectic time anyway, and I shouldn’t have to chase my bank, or even have fear it’s not going to get looked at, even if I do have time left in the process.
It’s just one of a number of “infrequent but important” banking activities that Monzo don’t seem to handle well!
Yep, conveyancing is a very dated and frustrating process!
Some companies have built solutions to try and improve this by making a big checklist that is updated by everyone involved but it needs all parties to sign up. Solicitors still seem to be in no rush to go digital
Just lots of people shuffling very expensive bits of paper around. It’s prime for being open sourced IMO, but I suspect a lot of people would be unhappy about that.
We got half way through the conveyancing process of a house that is literally two streets away from the one we’re on… You’d have thought we’d be able to use the relevant data from House 1… But no.
I’ve included a couple of screenshots from my conveyancer, it’s pretty much a fully digital process from the customers point of view.
I’ve had a 5 minute phone call with them as they wanted to do an introduction. All the documents I needed to provide were uploaded. They send everything digitally. I did have to use the postal service to send back signed deed and land registry form but anything else could be signed and uploaded.
In this screen each part of the circle has its own section that you click into, all the documents related are held in there. Anything new that needs action would see an area with a number assigned to it saying how many things need actioning.
Sadly not and very far from it. They love their old habits of lots of paper, faxes, posting letters/questions and going in person to sign and read stuff.
I just went with who the the estate agent recommended to me, along with the mortgage advisor, so she made a decent commission out of me
I’ll definitely do some more research this time and try and find one with the details online so I can see it all progressing. Last time the place I bought was empty and I was a first time buyer. So no chain, nobody to move out, about as simple as it could be. I know it won’t be that smooth next time.
Our conveyancer had an online portal and tracker, however, it needs to be manually updated by them. It sat at 12% complete for months with the same things ticked off, it suddenly shot up to 70% 5 minutes after I asked them about it one day.
It’s still sat at 70% today baring in mind we completed in August last year and moved in the next day
Although we had to wait until January to finally receive the the final docs due to a covenant and other things, I find it quite funnt
I was going to go with a local one who was a bit cheaper but in the end I just wanted to deal with everything via an online portal. The local one would have had me in and out, posting stuff all over, couldn’t be bothered with the hassle of all that.
I went instead with these guys below, my mortgage broker obviously gets commission for referring me to them, but in the end it’s worked out ok.
Apologies for the brief interruption in service. I removed a couple of off-topic messages from someone who seemed to have got their caps lock stuck on.
I needed to make bank transfers higher than the normal limits today, and it was a painless experience.
07:42 I message support asking for the increase to limits [I suppose slightly annoying that I couldn’t send this message over night but hey ho]
07:53 Monzo send generic response asking for more info
08:51 I reply with more info and a photo showing ID
09:02 My request is referred to a specialist
09:33 The limits are increased
If you cut out the bit where I’m delaying things, that whole process was only about 40-45 mins.
