Using Monzo without mobile data

[anon86964869]

Is it possible to use your Monzo card abroad without having mobile data roaming turned on? Vodafone want to charge me £5 a day for the privilege of using my own phone in the US and Canada! I’ll have wifi in the hotels and a GPRS signal just no data! Grateful for any advice - many thanks!

[anon44204028]

WiFi will be data just not mobile data. While you are connected to WiFi it will work (I use it in Essex on WiFi where there is no mobile signal)

[gwright15 (Graeme)]

The card should always work, with or without data. The bits which require data are the spending notifications and using the app.

[anon44204028]

@gwright15

The bits which require data are the spending notifications and using the app.

but that data connection can be over wifi it need not be mobile data via roaming

[anon86964869]

Thanks guys, much appreciated. Was a bit confused as I’d read that the system checks your phone GPS location and compares it to the merchant location and wasn’t sure if GPS worked without mobile data on.

[BobT (Bob)]

It doesn’t use GPS location:

@anon8997347

We actually do exactly this already

It doesn’t use GPS location:

The key phrase for iOS is “Significant Location Change”, which is activated when switching cell towers, and not by GPS.

As a result, this feature does not drain your battery like GPS would. We regularly run power profiling as part of development, because we care a lot about battery drain too.

tl;dr We’re doing the same thing as Dark Sky

Perhaps we should add this to our FAQ? Thanks for the feedback @keirwilliams

[anon23935806]

Actually, GPS or not, the Monzo servers would still have to talk to your phone to find out if its location changed, so without a data connection your transactions might get declined if you’ve got Location based security turned on.

[alexs (Alex Sherwood)]

Not if the way that I think this feature works is correct & all it does is compare your phone’s location with the location of your transaction.

In that case, if Monzo can’t pick up your phone’s location (because your phone’s switched off) it would be illogical to block the transaction, just because Monzo don’t know where you are. Instead, I assume that Monzo’s other fraud detection rules (which are active regardless of whether location sharing is switched on) will kick in.

I explained my theory (I could be wrong about this) in more detail here -

Any problems with hopping countries quickly?

My assumption is that location based security is used to check your location (the location of your phone) vs where your ‘card present’ transactions are being made. If the transaction’s not being made in the same place as your location, it would be more likely to be flagged as potentially fraudulent. So it should be helpful if you switch that setting on. But if you don’t have a data connection, Monzo will use other methods to check whether the transaction is fraudulent & their checks are designe…

If I was wrong though, I expect we’d have seen posts / tweets about transactions randomly being declined by now, from users already who’ve been caught out by this issue, as obviously people’s phone’s run out of battery quite a lot…

[anon85014982]

Your Monzo card will still work as normal when abroad, even if you have location-base security enabled, and forget to take your phone with you

My partner left her phone switched off at home on a recent trip to Bruges, and her card still worked flawlessly wherever we went
She obviously was not able to see any notifications or top up her card via the app until we returned home

Based on that, id say you will be fine, and have the added benefit that when in a wifi zone, you will pick up any notifications in the app and be able to top up etc

[anon86964869]

Thanks for all the replies, much appreciated!

[anon44268799]

Suggestion: order a free pay as you go SIM card from Three (and get your phone unlocked, if need be), then top up with their £20 add-on. 30 days, 12 GB data plus… some amount of calls and texts back to the UK, and so long as you’ve bought one of the add-ons, it all comes out of that allowance without additional roaming charges, for a lot of countries. The US is one of them, but Canada isn’t.