Hi there,
First of all, thanks all for your hard work. I’ve been a very happy and loyal customer for over 2 years now and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Monzo to any of my friends looking for a new bank, and I think what you do and the way you guys do it is amazing.
I’m one of the 6.2 million British residents with a non-UK nationality, and one of the 3.7 millions EU citizens living in the UK (source). As such, and, I believe, just like many people in those numbers, I often have to send money abroad - in my case it’s to pay back my student loan, as well as helping a family member back in my home country.
Now, when it comes to transferring money to a UK account in Monzo, it’s so smooth and almost futuristic : I add the recipient as a payee (if that’s not already been done), I enter the amount, make it recurrent if needed, and that’s it.
But when I need to do a monthly transfer to an account outside of the UK, I need to:
- Manually write down their name
- Enter an amount of money and change it as many time as it takes for the conversion to end up with the right amount in the recipient’s currency
- Manually write down their 11 character-long BIC code and their 27 character-long IBAN
- Set an alarm on my phone or on a calendar so I don’t forget to do it all over again the next month, if I need to make it recurrent
This is a painstakingly long and rough process, with no automation available, and contrasts rather shockingly with the experience of doing the same operation but with an account that’s within the UK as the recipient. Currently I need to go through all this process at least twice a month, if I don’t forget about it, while paying my rent happens almost magically by itself using a scheduled transfer to one of my saved payees. Especially since Monzo integrates transparently with Wise, which does implement a similar UX around transfers and automation as Monzo’s same-country transfers when using Wise’s apps, so from a user’s pov it just looks like I’m missing out on very useful features by using Monzo.
On top of that it’s a worry for my security because having to manually type down long codes increases tenfold the likelihood of making a typo or mistake and sending the money to the wrong person.
To make my life much easier, here are three features I’d like to see in Monzo around international bank transfers:
- Saving the details of an international bank account in my account’s payees (name, BIC code and IBAN)
- Expressing the amount I’d like to transfer in the recipient account’s currency
- Scheduling recurring international bank transfers
Is there any work planned in this area, and does anyone at Monzo know when I should be expecting such features to land?
