I wish this was the case of my users…saying that, we haven’t ended up in the news in at least 5 years for lost data! Mostly because we took the “local” desktop away from them for most!
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A lot of jobs will also do credit searches and criminal record check in finance. Mine certainly did.
The hiring stops even with bad credit … Wed hired someone and they were subject to these last two checks and we had to say no on their credit check. 
I’m now wondering what checks are part of hiring to have an FCA licence 
(is that even considered?)
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We do background checks but not credit checks. I think that’s slightly unfair to be honest to decline someone for a job based on their credit history, although I guess there’s various schools of thought on that topic!
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I worked in debt collection and finance lending, might be why credit checks is prevalant.
And I’m not sure why that leads to removing the job offer, I’ve never asked because I’ve not been in that position. Might ask management the specifics tomorrow.
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On the topic of what can monzo guys see I remember this email I got in may 2017 from “Venkat Head if Lending at Monzo” which freaked me out in that it made me realise how much people at Monzo are poking at our data. It is probably fair game (this why I m still with Monzo) but it did freak me out and still makes me uncomfortable when I rethink about it (like now).
Here is a screenshot of the email
The other thing was this was at a time where a lot of Monzo staff where doing intros in this forum… and I had never heard of this Venkat before… so made me even more suspicious. Also when I did reply that I was not interested I did not get any reply (which felt again not Monzo like), so freaking out even more. Anyway just sharing now as I m reading this thread
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Always a helpful answer 
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Hi Karim and thanks for your reply! As you mentioned, this was back in May 2017 so a while ago now! However let me just clear up what happened here.
We ran a trial scheme called “Spread The Cost” to see if this was a legitimate idea that users might want to use. We selected a small pool of people, based on very specific data criteria - as I recall, purchases had to be quite large and from a certain group of merchants (for example, one group was flight tickets). The scenario would be that we’d credit you back the amount of your purchase, and then split it into several payments, one per month until the cost was paid back.
Venkat, our Head of Lending, then sent out the email you received asking the users if they’d be interested in testing the feature.
I can confirm that this was a legitimate test we were running at the time.
May I ask what about it made you uncomfortable? Was it that this trial wasn’t publicised in advance in combination with you not having heard of the staff member? I think that one thing we learned from this, and other tests such as the Bulb energy offer, is to share the relevant information ahead of time and we certainly plan to do this in the future. I’m happy to confirm that we are working on ways in which our community can get to know a larger amount of team-members, but I’m sure you also recognise that in a company of 200+ people (and growing) - you may sometimes hear from staff members whose names aren’t familiar to you! However, in times where this may be the case, we’re happy to confirm anyone’s position here on the forum, and ideally we’ll always get them on here to discuss the test/feature/idea directly 
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Exactly this. A bit more the second point since -although I don’t post much- I do read a lot this forum, and I was familiar with a lot of the Monzo team names (especially that thread where everyone was introducing themselves)
If this was my legacy bank I would probably not have much thoughts about it because I do not know any one who works there. I guess that is a drawback of being very open. People do expect everything to be publicised before and therefore anything that is not feels a bit weird.
But thanks for confirming Simon 
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Reading that email from the screenshot, I’m pretty sure that in the same situation my thought process would be;
- Who the o.o are you???
- Where did you get my information?
- If I’ve not been hacked, why are you going through my transactions?
- (Then likely anger at having had to run through all those thoughts before becoming paranoid it’s going to be used for marketing)
Overall I think most of what’s been communicated to me has been clear and effective but I’m sure something like that would have probably given me quite a scare at first.
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Just for reference, Venkat was introduced, but in a more formal way than just posting a ‘hi’ in the Foyer category. I’m not disputing you’d not heard of him – there are a lot of posts on this forum – just info if you’re interested in reading more about his role:
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Fair enough! And thanks for the link.
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I’ve always believed that it was because if someone is in a desperate financial situation they are more likely to be open to bribes / more likely to try and take money from the till?
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Yes. This is why the Civil Service will do full background financial checks if you require any kind of Security Clearance.
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