Why Aren’t Legacy Banks Better?

My point probably wasn’t all that eloquently made and was pretty harsh for which I apologise. My comment was meant with some tongue in cheek but I forgot the obvious rule about tone not coming across

I think my own posting history shows that I don’t come here simply to rubbish fintech and or
Monzo. There are two sides to all of these things and if we’re not allowed to talk about the ones that reflect badly on Monday so then that should be stated in the community guidelines.

However in this case the poster made a statement that is blatantly untrue and provable through a very quick search of this forum.

The fact that legacy banks are better at resolving these kind of disputes isn’t anti Monzo or anti fintech.

If you were to dispute the transaction with Amex now on a Sunday afternoon, they would return the funds to you immediately and advise you that if there is an issue or that the chargeback findings are ruled against you that you may end up paying out again. There is no end of post here and other places of Monzo and other Fintechs not following the same process and arbitrarily puting the onus on the customer to resolve

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Again, nothing is “provable” via the content of this forum so let’s not go around that circle again.

I think funding comes into this refund issue as newer institutions simply don’t (presumably) have the depth of pockets to refund up front and argue later. That may be a worse service from one perspective, I’m sure, but it isn’t the ultimate measure of “goodness” or “badness” in banking.

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Two days now and no examples forthcoming? While I may not have put it in quite the same words myself, it feels like “the poster made a statement that is blatantly untrue and provable through a very quick search of this forum” :wink:

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You mean, this one?

That gives us a minority. Monzo has 4.4M customers. I don’t see 2.2M complaints…

I may well be in the minority, but I dislike this approach. Mainly because it’s a false sense of “winning”. Imagine the annoyance when you think you have x amount to spend, but 50% gets taken away again because you lost the chargeback (they aren’t fool proof). I think it’s a societal thing of “I want it now”, which isn’t how the world works.

For what it’s worth, I’ve opened and “won” three chargebacks with Monzo, all via the app, all very easy. Conversely, when a festival was cancelled and there were rumours of the financial instability of the company, I tried to open a section 75 dispute with my credit card and had to sit in a phone queue, in order to do so. Seconds on monzo vs 30 minutes or so elsewhere. YMMV

Isn’t that why they’re called challenger banks? To challenge the status quo?

You forgot the final part, “…in the event that you willingly made a payment and now disagree with it”. You can’t confuse chargebacks, with actual fraud.

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I’ve seen curve refund me without bothering the company a few times out of their own pockets no question asked so not all fintechs just wait and I’ve had positive outcome at times from fintechs

I don’t believe the law states anywhere that a bank must front the money from chargeback. Happy to be proven wrong.

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It doesn’t - but it’s certainly a better experience for the customer when their money is rightly returned to them immediately. Plus most large banks will just give the customer the money regardless of the outcome of the chargeback in most genuine circumstances. Monzo just add a lot of friction. Definitely a low point.

Point of chargeback is you either win it or don’t you can’t force a bank to pay you a chargeback if it fails banks follow rules it’s up to them if they give you it or not if you disagree with everything you can go down route of a complaint with the bank but if something is marked as fraud bank are advised to pay it back to you but tsb have fraud guarantee which pays back almost all cases of fraud

That may be the point but the reality is most banks don’t even bother with the chargeback procedure in the majority of cases and just directly refund the customer regardless of the outcome later on. TSB have just formalised what most banks do in practice.

Like I said, this is a drawback of Monzo.

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I’ve never had issues with monzo and monzo have been more than helpful I’m happy to be a monzo customer compare that with experience I’ve had with RBS which was appalling and still the case

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The original point by @Neil0 was that it’s a regulatory requirement to do so. We can’t downgrade that to “some banks choose to [to be nice]” to keep the argument going.

You also can’t really use the fact banks choose to do that, as a beating stick for any challenger bank. It’s a positive for those banks, sure, but there’s no guarantee they’ll continue to do it for none fraudulent chargebacks, and there’s no requirement to do so.

Don’t forget, these banks will make that money back in other revenue lines, from the customers. It’s not free money. They’re most likely playing the odds, too - only something small like 20% of chargebacks are decided in the merchant’s favour.

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This is exactly right… legacy systems are struggling to add modern bolt-ons without causing a total catastrophe with either customer data, security or any number of bugs that creep in with such archaic systems.

As a student I worked at Lloyd’s Bank in the call centres, and Jesus EVERYTHING was so backward you’d be forgiven for thinking it was the 70s. All the TMS systems that they had for ordering currency, all the business banking was paper-based (and still is in some cases, even though the customer still completes transactions digitally). But this problem goes for any large corporate who hasn’t thoughtfully developed their own software.

Vodafone had a software update and systems merge in the UK that was catastrophic in terms of losing credibility, charging customers totally incorrectly, accidentally giving customers multiple accounts with multiple numbers. Etc. Etc. They were left with multiple data sources for what tariff the customer was on. None of it correct. All of it led to things like people paying for 4G, but only ever getting 3G. People got so pissed off because no one took ownership and eventually people left by the boatload and the ombudsman had to take notice.

In a nutshell… archaic backend systems with no scalability.

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Thought I’d highlight this thread, since it’s a first hand testimonial about how effectively the fraudulent transaction was handled.

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Or see for yourself

https://community.monzo.com/search?q=fraud

You’re not going to convince everyone here by posting to one positive link anymore than I am going to convince you with multiple links.

It’s OK to disagree on these things… I personally think Legacy banks are better at handling these things than the fintechs (all of them and not just Monzo)

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I used to be with Vodafone. Had a fairly straightforward contract and didn’t ever make use of anything that would add charges on outside of the contract (never exceeded my limits, never roamed, etc), so charging wise that part never went wrong.

BUT

For many years, I could never access my account online. If I tried to log in, it would load an Oracle-branded login page instead (seemed to me like instead of showing me the customer page, it was giving me some kind of system maintenance login page instead). Obviously, I couldn’t log in with that. Chatting with support, getting my account reset, never led anywhere. I’d always have to resolve my issues another way instead. Thought I was going mad until I found other people on the internet saying they had the same problem (Vodafone never admitted there was a problem, always said there was nothing wrong with their site). It was only finally resolved when my contract was up and I thought “I might as well have one last plug at their site before I get very grumpy down other avenues” and it turned out the site (a) now looked totally different, and (b) worked, so I guess they built a new site at some point instead of fixing the broken one. It’d been so long at that point I was genuinely shocked the problem was gone.

tl;dr, suppose what I’m asking is, was the constantly broken site a consequence of their catastrophic systems merge, or was this actually a completely separate disaster? :sweat_smile:

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It’s was probably both :smiley:

I worked at Vodafone when this happened - they switched their system over from their own in-house house one to a system by Oracle.

When you logged in the online site had to determine which system your site was on and direct you to your appropriate ‘My Account’. It didn’t exactly go smoothly as we all know.

They even had to set up an internal call centre for staff calling with Oracle related issues because the system was just that bad. Everything you do is an ‘order’ - even changing an address and you’d often find an order just got stuck for no reason in ‘pending’ and this would lock everything out and any further changes or access.

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It was a huge systems migration that was a total failure. Somewhere along the line, customer data and account info from the two systems was well and truly buggered. It led to a total crash in customer satisfaction throughout Europe. So guessing it will have definitely been linked. Some people reported that their bills had inflated, others had no access to account info. Some had no 4G because of a legacy data failure deeper than the new systems could even see.

I went to the ombudsman, got my contract ended 6 months in, got to keep my brand new phone too. But they were terrible throughout, clearly having to deal with a daily onslaught of customers not getting what they paid for. The call centre tech people never took ownability of anything, there was even a specific vodafone ombudsman Ombudsman team set up (the vodafone employees who had balls of steel) to deal with angry customers.

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Before I was a teacher, I worked in a social work department. The department uses as database system to store all the personal details of children who came through or made contact with the department.

This system they used was built in the late 1980’s so they created a ‘new’ second system in the 2000’s to update the system. All this did was scrape the old first system for information and was much slower due to that fact. When I was leaving in 2012, they were introducing a ‘newer’ third system which used the second system, which scraped the first system…

All the complaints I ever heard from the social workers was how slow these ‘new’ systems were. Luckily, I had access to the original old first system (it was never restricted once the ‘newer’ systems were introduced) so always used that as it was much faster.

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