Maybe how you need ten passwords and your grandmother’s national insurance number to get into your account.
But… They don’t hand off security to your email inbox, so there’s that.
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THIS. I hate it. Why not allow me to reply in-app? Or via email? Is it not secure enough? 
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I just logged into my Santander account and had to enter each on a separate page.
- 10 digit account number
- name of first pet
- name of my maternal grandmother
- password
- online banking pin
Yay monzo.
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Email is pretty insecure (it transits unencrypted* and unauthenticated), however for 90% of their “messages” it’s more than secure enough (only the last 10% which actually contain sensitive info could be sent via the website). In-app would definitely be secure enough (it transits over the same protocols as the website).
In reality though this is just security theatre - first and foremost they want you to feel like they’re taking security seriously even if they’re not actually doing so - just look at how they’re teaching their users to tell whether an email is legitimate or not - by checking whether your postcode is in there - the postcode that everyone including your pizza delivery driver knows. 
*well it can be encrypted if both servers support it however it’s still not authenticated so an man in the middle can still intercept the connection and read the message.
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Not if it’s encrypted and the recipient can authenticate the message using published, public keys. Essentially the whole point of key pairs…
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Their complete inability to deal with closing an account due to bereavement. At least an hour on the phone to be put through to the right person who is then unable to help at 5:01pm.
Very insensitive throughout the process. Not restricted to legacy banks though, most companies, utility providers etc require ardouous back and forth on the phone, with no direct line from the switchboard and no info online.
I have accounts with both Barclays and Santander, and both are almost always hit and miss when it comes to available balances.
Because most of my transactions are by card, the balances are never fully reflected and often I see a balance of one figure, only to see that it goes both up and down.
I have to travel 10 miles to a branch which is only open part time hours, and they have nobody available to help with anything, I had to go to a larger bank to deal with my query.
Monzo has been such a breath of fresh air, my balance says what it is, the instant notifications and categorising of payments makes everything super clear and transparent and nigh on impossible to make mistakes and falling victim to bank charges.
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Neither S/MIME nor GPG are in widespread use and nobody knows how to use them properly.
Indeed but it would only take the bank to be able to use them… They ignore any kind of encryption even when it would make things much simpler for customers that use them. I’ve had to download and print documents simply because email is deemed insecure (and post isn’t?).
Monzo may not need to bother if the in-app communication is solid - legacy bank replacements for email seem to be universally awful. More than likely if I sent them an digitally signed email they’d have some knowledge of what it was even if they didn’t verify it.
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I agree with you. If the secure messages function is so secure, I don’t understand why they can’t discuss things like addresses- which I mentioned right in my very first message to them while trying to sort out direct debits. It’s just inconvenient when I’m overseas and can’t call in, I’ll just wait till my CA card gets to me and sort DD’s then.
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As if to underscore this thread, as I was moving my stuff over to monzo today my old account suddenly went £30 into overdraft… from a Monzo payment, made on Thursday (and processed instantly by Monzo). The old bank simply hadn’t got around to debiting it until this evening (Monday).
I’d only checked the ‘upcoming payments’ screen about 30 minutes before and it was empty… proving that screen completely useless too.
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The fact as already stated that payments take days to hit your account. You only realise just how handy instant payments are when you experience payments days after!!
I’m with first direct so they are really quite good. Monzo will have to come up with something really decent to surpass them and make me want to switch. If Monzo can scale their customer service then that may happen. I like the live chat Monzo has, but also a phone service as sometimes it just helps to talk!
The thing is, I’d love FD to have live chat like Monzo. The telephone takes so much attention whereas I can do other things when I’m in a live text chat.
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FD have annoyed me recently… I have one standing order that will not cancel through their website due to an internal error… phone them up, eventually get through and I just get ‘computer says no’. So I’m stuck with it, and they don’t have a solution other than ‘keep the current account open and transfer money into it’. Monzo are by default better than that (as they wouldn’t be dealing with legacy systems that could break in strange ways to start with).
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That’s a shame. They’re usually better than that, hopefully it gets sorted eventually for you.
For me, the worst feature of my bank has been their over-zealousness in blocking card transactions that were perfectly genuine. The worst aspect of this is that there’s no way to call them up ahead of a transaction to pre-authorise it (so buying Glastonbury tickets has been made even more nerve-wracking 
), and they can’t guarantee that if I try again it will work next time.
This has happened even when:
- It’s an online retailer that I’ve previously used
- It’s for an airline ticket for myself (and from an airline I’ve previously used). Surely in the case of an airline ticket, they can allow it to go through and check afterwards? It’s not as if the fraudster could run off with it, since it would have to have their name on it!
- I’ve told them I’m going abroad
At one point, they blocked twelve transactions in two years, and I had to get a credit card from a different provider just to be sure that important transactions actually got through.
This has been less of a problem recently - though another airline ticket purchase was declined only last week 
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The thing I hate with mine is the “I’ve told them I’m going abroad”
Each year I’ve done this, they’ve blocked the card and phoned me to ask me if I’m in x country.
Last couple of years I’ve not told them I’m going abroad and I haven’t had an issue 
To add another one that I’ve just seen today from Santander, having a paperless online only account, yet slapping a “THIS IS AN ONLINE DOCUMENT” watermark on the background of the PDF, looks ridiculous and actually makes reading the smaller statement text difficult (not shown for obvious reasons).
They seem to be on the side of idiots that think that an “online” document is somehow less authentic than an “official” one, even though fraudsters can print both just fine.
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Why have you stayed with this bank for so long, if I may ask?