My partner and I have been wanting to open a Monzo joint account for months. The app simply doesn’t allow us to open one and every time we ask, we’re told “Sorry we can’t let you apply for a joint account right now.” Not open, just apply.
We can walk into almost any other high street bank and open a joint account immediately. Why are joint accounts so hard to open with Monzo?
Addendum: I’m a US citizen (on a work visa) and so I’m wondering if that might be prohibiting me from having a joint account in the UK.
I agree - very strange.
Both my partner and I have had Monzo personal accounts for some time, but we couldn’t get a joint account together.
In the end we went to First Direct for the switching bribe and the overdraft (which Monzo wouldn’t have)
Monzo has some weird criteria that they won’t disclose. Support is waste of time as you get the same robotic response (literally 4 people passed me around and copied the same message).
And then issue is not with us (well I guess it us according to Monzo) because we successfully opened Starling and HSBC Premier joint accounts.
The opaque eligibility criteria for joint accounts, and the vague and unhelpful rejection message when trying to apply for a joint account is dreadful customer services.
Since my partner moved in we’re planning to manage our finance side by side using our personal accounts and a joint account in the middle. We have a carefully choreographed plan which is completely scuppered by not being able to open a joint account with Monzo.
We’ve no interest in bouncing between different banks for this, and even though I’ve been Full Monzo for years now but this is essentially a deal-breaker and as much as it would considerably pain me to do so, I might have to upsticks to Starling.
Can’t begin to put into words how disappointed I am with this.
We’re really sorry to hear you’re upset by the decision you have received and sorry that we can’t share more about why you haven’t been able to progress at this stage and understand if you do decide to venture elsewhere that can faciliate your banking needs.
As a few others have mentioned Starling may be a good look for yourselves, it’s a common trend that users on the forum praise Starling for their Joint Account offerings.
I get the ‘other services are also available’ transparency angle, but the frequency of Monzo employees openly recommending competitors for this account type is very, very surprising.
Because its something we know we can’t offer at the moment, may change in the future to accommodate more applications but at present it’s not the case.
And instead of being that guy who says nope that’s your lot, I most certainly refer to Starling as the next best thing as that’s where I had mine opened within the space of a few hours (hours for other half to open his sole account, about 3 minutes to open the joint account from then).
I was surprised too, but I’m actually grateful. For all my grumbling of the customer service approach in the app, having an honest response like this that confirms to me that Starling is my best bet to achieve what I need. That makes my decision a lot easier than if they’d minced their words and left me stewing about the decision.
So I appreciate the honesty and that makes me a little sadder that I’ll have to leave.
In my opinion if someone is struggling to find a provider to reach their end goal we should all be doing everything we can to help, even if we don’t offer the service.
Why can 2 people be accepted for Monzo Personal accounts, but be rejected for a Joint account? Bonkers. Unless there’s a reason behind it that no-one is sharing.
I completely admire your ‘I’m not the guy who says nope that’s your lot’ attitude, but this is bigger than the admirable representative people here suggesting how to work around the failure of a branded product - an advertised selling point for Monzo - which isn’t actually available to some existing Monzo customers.
You’ll never get any sense out of a Monzo employee when it comes to JA. I’m fully speculating now, but there’s some other reason they don’t want people signing up for them, and it’s nothing to do with computer says no. For some reason they’ve made that eligibility to be, please go away and use one of our competitors
One concern I had recently was whether there was any room for error in the automated process.
For example I recently realised my partner and I are registered in app as living at different versions of the same address (due to issues in how our house was added to address registers).
I’m always wary of these checks as two near identical answers can greatly alter the result if the values supplied vary even slightly. (Eg when entering your job role on a credit application.)
I already do this for my bills, but we also want to pool stuff like supermarket spending etc that we can just pay for from the joint account. I know Monzo has ways around all these things but they’re all slight fudges which would get quote tiresome managing on a more than daily basis.
