Relatedly, this story of issue with SCA clearly isn’t just aMonzo problem, as I’ve just had this message from First Direct:
Slight smell of ‘please stop complaining to us’ about it 
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Monzo chat today said they could “see” the declined/incomplete transactions from Waitrose, but could not throw further light on why this happened to an account with sufficient funds/matching post code etc. I was told to contact Waitrose as the problem is at their end. I can try but we all know the rabbit holes I will then go down. I was hoping if enough customers are inconvenienced the 2 IT departments will talk to each other.
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Thanks for your explanations here @Dan5!
For the uninitiated, could you explain a bit more what a soft decline is against, presumably, a hard one? 
So big caveat, I no longer do frontline work so this is what I’ve gleaned from Slack.
My understanding is that we’re basically saying “hey, we can’t approve this transaction without some form of additional security” and the merchant should come back with a 3DS challenge (or some other information I guess).
Some merchants aren’t ready for the soft decline, and so they treat it as a hard decline and just fail to process the transaction.
I’m sure that’s over simplified, but I’m very far from a cards expert 
edit: If you want a bit more technical info this looks like a reasonable explanation and this is from UK Finance.
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Amazing, thank you!
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It does seem like today is a day when various banks all seem to have decided to contact customers ahead of the impending regulatory deadline.
I’ve had an email from Chase, an email from Tide and a text from First Direct all within a matter of hours!
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Starling came thru this morning.
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I guess because on Monday it all “goes” live and so by then an email will be too late.
For context we’ve ramping up in the background, identifying merchants which are causing us an issue and working with them prior to the deadline.
So issues like this with Waitrose are an exception, and so come Monday customers should notice no difference other than a few more 3DS checks for payments.
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Even those have also been ramped up gradually, as merchants themselves have prepared, so most customers will probably notice no difference on Monday at all.
Or at least, that’s if everything goes to plan and they don’t end up wondering why they are getting loads of online declines!
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Thanks for all the explanations. Will try and use Apple Pay more.
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