Either on or off I still get the massive Find Friends on Monzo button and image than hogs most the screen and pushes Recents down. 
Does it just stop them seeing you listed as an option for them to pay if near you?
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If you don’t have contacts in your phone who are with Monzo app will not be able to find and will give the message you see. If the setting is off you can’t use monzo.me as well.
Basically this for Monzo to Monzo payments and for monzo.me.
Ah so it does and just gives ‘sorry we couldn’t find anyone with that username’, is that a bug that it also affects being paid via monzo.me or intentional? If so it should prob have the description under the toggle like ‘Hide Monzo from recent apps’ explain what it does?
On a side note I’ve just noticed under Notifications I have a Lending promotions toggle, but disabled? Is that so you toggle on to get adverts? Why would anyone want them. Weird.
There’s no clear rationale for linking monzo.me to contacts access - there has been discussion about this in various threads on this forum.
You can use Starling settle up without this restriction…
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I think this is to get notified if you qualify for an overdraft, or similar.
I got this response ages ago
In this case we do need some information to reliably link the accounts in order to make monzo to monzo payments.
Using a phone number works well because the numbers of your friends are already stored in your phone number, but the app does need these numbers in order to know which of your friends have a monzo account already, and to make payments to their account without requiring any other information.
Otherwise you can simply set up a bank transfer from the payments tab, this would just require the persons account number and sort code, but not their phone number.
I appreciate this is not quite as applicable to monzo.me as it is for monzo to monzo payments, but they are part of the same feature therefore that setting does need to be enabled.
I can assure you as Adam said above, that your contacts are only used to facilitate this feature, your data is not shared or used for any other purposes.
I hope this clears things up. Thanks for your feedback, let me know if you have any other questions!
So it looks like necessity by design, not by necessity…