Using Monzo everywhere: improving merchant acceptance

Anyone had any problems with Better Leisure (aka GLL)? I’ve been a Monzo account holder since Beta phase and still can’t get them to accept my card at POS terminal.

12.08.2018 - Now resolved

Weston-super-Mare sea beach toilets 20 pence entrance charge gates won’t accept Monzo contactless :joy: Not a big problem…
But my Nationwide card has been accepted :))

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Finally, a Monzo transaction that can legitimately use the :poop: emoji :laughing:

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We don’t currently. This is the first time we have seen a large company change their policy to refuse our cards - something that is very much against Mastercard rules. As such, tracking transaction patterns to spot such rare events doesn’t feel as responsive as going off customer reports.

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Monzo worked coming back from Spain on an Easyjet UK flight. Payment was delayed by a day but guess that’s fairly normal?

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I just had a problem paying by Monzo at my leisure centre. Leisurecentre.com (Hengrove, Bristol). Be interesting to know if anyone using one of the 80 other centres in the same group has the same issue.

In that case, that’s Life Leisure, LeisureCentre.com and Greenwich Leisure Limited all having problems accepting Monzo.

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I used Monzo on Easyjet flight from Porto to Manchester ok. Maybe present it obscuring the brand and hope flight attendant doesn’t notice.

I suspect because the payment is delayed some Monzo customers have overspent by the time Easyjet come to collect the payment couple days later and Monzo are probably declining these payments outright whilst big banks who can easily recoup arrears will just honour these and put their customer into unauthorised overdraft.

Monzo needs to do more to protect offline merchants from it’s naughty cardholders, at the end of the day it’s Monzo’s reputation at risk. No business will trust a bank that doesn’t settle a bill for delayed payments that their customer has consumed.

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Iirc monzo has no choice but to honour offline transactions and will put you into overdraft if necessary

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I think the problem is if you’re already up against your overdraft limit. What do they do then?

You’d go in to unauthorised overdraft.

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Seems Monzo are not paying merchants when their customer has ran out of money and overdraft, that’s why rightfully so they are being singled out by airlines.

Monzo will need to start taking responsibility for their dodgy cardholders and not just leave the merchant out of pocket. Forget big companies like Easyjet but imagine a stall holder in a field at a festival forced to do offline transactions to then find out days later they won’t be paid, that could put them out of business.

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I think this would have only happened during the prepaid card days. Once a transaction has been authorised there’s little chance of the merchant not being paid

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So why are airlines still complaining they are not being paid and briefing staff not to accept Monzo against MasterCard rules?

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Because they aren’t listening to what they are being told

There does seem to be some evidence on here that the message is getting through to easyJet and it’s crew around accepting monzo as a normal bank

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Because it happened it happened while Monzo was in it’s prepaid period. You seem to be beating a dead horse here. It does not happen now that everyone on Monzo now has current account cards.

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The prepaid cards were online only weren’t they?

Did this actually happen? Even on the prepaid when I had a few “delayed” or offline payments they still took me into a negative balance so the merchant got their money.

Yes, that’s why airline staff were told to not accept them.
It might be that smaller ones are allowed to go through but the larger ones were too much of a risk to Monzo

I’m pretty sure I read that there were some pubs that didn’t accept Monzo (prepaid) as well (we are talking over 6 months ago now).

People would leave their card behind the bar to run up a tab, and then leave the card there (with no money on it).

I’d be interested to know what would happen on the pre paid card, if the customer did exactly as described above?

Would the merchant end up losing out in those situations?