Love all of those myself, but my absolute favourite thing is declined notifications - knowing why a payment has been declined is incredible (especially these days when queueing in a shop is more of an ordeal than it used to be!)
9 times out of 10 it’s something I can resolve on the spot (no money in the joint account… oh yes, forgot to transfer from the food shopping pot! Done. Can retry payment). With legacy banks you have no idea why it’s rejecting.
The best example happened to me a while ago with a restaurant. One of our favourite restaurant’s card machine was broken. So they said to us ‘give us your name and number and we’ll call you in the following few days and do a manual payment over the phone. No probs. So they called me back, I gave them the card details, and it was declined. No idea why though as I had the funds to cover it… up pops the notification which was along the lines of “ Declined due to incorrect expiry date”
Told the person ‘either your typing the date wrong or I gave you the wrong date there’… they were surprised that I knew what was wrong, as from their end they have no feedback as to why a card payment is declined. It’s detailed and timely notifications like this that impress me much more than ‘you’ve just spent £4 in Subway ’ while I’m stood in Subway!
It’s fun to speculate about these things. My guess would be a combination of it being much more difficult to add these features to their legacy systems and customer inertia meaning that they’re not really under pressure too.
But it’s also on Fintechs to be at the forefront of this innovation as they have to give people a reason to switch. It’s also much easier (not easy!) starting with a blank slate and a modern tech stack unencumbered by decades of technical debt.
That said, this works both ways. The forum is generally full of ridiculing the established banks but the amount of “basics” that Monzo are missing isn’t insignificant. For every person that couldn’t live without instant notifications / bill pots / salary sorter there’s likely as least as many that value credit cards / mortgages / paying in money for free / a website / an iPad app / cheque imaging…
If you get a notification like card spend you don’t recognise with monzo you can go on to chat in app and within a little while it could be refunded that’s what legacy banks avoid that interaction they want digital to be digital only not liking you to a human
I’m sorry but are you new here? Or maybe just an infrequent visitor. Search the dozen or more threads about how next to impossible Monzo CS is to get hold of and perhaps reevaluate that statement.
Maybe Follow up with a search that shows the number of people that have a difficulty getting chargebacks for fraudulent transactions.
The other one to search for is the frequent threads on the hidden “contact customer service button.
The legacy banks are far far superior at recognising and refunding fraudulent transactions than most of the new fintechs
Anyhow, back on topic… I have mentioned before about how the GCC compiler had becoming lumbering and stale for the lack of competition and how the new Clang compiler, written from scratch, properly jolted it into action. If anything, Clang is now chasing GCC, such is the turnaround. For a while they found that very tough - “like getting an elephant to dance”. I reckon there are shades of that for the banks
Different people, different experience, different opinion.
Searching the forum for evidence of a view is a pretty flawed approach, really, since people rarely open a forum account to state that “everything’s OK and nothing remarkable in going on”. A lot of forum posts should never be mistaken as representing a majority of anything. The evidence just isn’t there.
I don’t see missing chat or hidden charges as others have said I go straight to help and chat is there easy when I use other banks many mean you have to either phone up or chat on website but I’ve never had easy option that monzo have for chat and most options I see in monzo are better than most legacy banks I know monzo can do better on certain things but so can the rest of the banks
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
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.
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”
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Declined due to incorrect expiry date”
’ while I’m stood in Subway!
).
