I would love to see them have a log of pending submissions a bit like when you bid on eBay.
That way you can see if it’s already in the queue, and vote for the correct if multiple. Enough votes and it gets auto updated.
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Monzo, you’ve changed man. Unlike my pending submission…
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I find the support very polite but lacking. The chat response times are appalling. Monzo is good for my light expenses but First Direct are my main bank & will remain so as they’re far better than Monzo IMO. Apologies if that upsets Monzo and the many that are Monzo worshippers but you want my honest views. If it’s any consolation Monzo are heaps better than Starling. I had to close my account with them as they were appalling.
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I had to contact support recently, for a pretty trivial issue, and I wasn’t impressed. I’d get a response from a COp, and then immediately get passed to someone else. Went through three people before they escalated to the relevant team.
Wasn’t anything overly important, or time sensitive, but didn’t give me a huge amount of confidence.
Interesting to hear, what do you like so much about FD? My Santander graduate account is maturing now and I was going to swap to FD for the £100 gift and constant good service that has been reviewed, plus they offer £100 when you leave too. So in time I will go full Monzo.
What’s FD like? I heard they have recently updated their app too?
Just opened my account with FD yesterday for the same reasons you’ve stated. £200 free money
FD are the only organisation where if you call you get through straight away to a person. I’ve dealt with Santander & Lloyds before and often you can be on the phone for 15/20 minutes until you get through. When dealing with FD they handle problems quickly & efficiently. Unfortunately Monzo’s chat is far too slow & unacceptable particularly if you had a major problem. I went to FD after becoming disillusioned with HSBC. Although the latter own FD they are very different. I’ve had various disputes with FD over the 16 years I’ve had an account but these have always been handled fairly even when they haven’t gone my way. Their staff are polite & knowledgeable. Whilst Monzo are polite some of their assistance is poor and they always seem to refer issues to their Customer Advocacy Team so it ends up with them giving their final response & if you don’t like it you have to go to the FOS. FD consistently score high on ratings. I never recommend anyone lightly but for me they’re a 10/10 for all round banking. They don’t provide instant notifications of funds in & out or some of the other Monzo features but this is in no way a deal breaker for me. In addition, why would I want some of the very restrictive limits imposed by Monzo which FD do not apply? Furthermore, I can pay in cash or cheques easily at HSBC branches or any post office and do an online instantaneous transfer to my Monzo account. Monzo’s handling of paying in cheques & cash is lacking big time. I can also draw out £1000 cash per day using my FD debitcard at HSBC branches & all Post Offices.
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In fairness, Nationwide are pretty good on that front too. I usually get straight through to a person on the rare occasions that I need to call them.
I have gone full Monzo, but in all honesty I wish I hadn’t. I’d used Monzo for odds and ends since prepaid times, but the full Monzo CASS switch has been very problematic - I’ve used CASS to switch accounts half a dozen times before over the years with zero problems, but with the switch to Monzo I’ve had a string of messed up direct debits (some duplicated, one in a zombie state, and one where £150 has left my account and not been received) and several of my payments are broken because reference information used by the recipient was replaced by “sent from Monzo” during the transfer. I’m only halfway through the first month, and it’s needed call after call to fix things.
Biggest issue is customer support though. Even with the generally-mediocre Santander I could talk to someone. Monzo has a huge amount of work to do here.
It’s a shame, as it’s fine when things work and some stuff is genuinely great - instant notifications, get paid a day early - and as a crowdfunding investor i’d like the bank I invested in to be good enough to use as my main bank account. But customer service is too slow and i’m about one more problem from switching away again 
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I haven’t gone full monzo as I’m a student.
I need access to a large overdraft that, tbh, I haven’t used at all while I’ve been at uni, but student finance is unpredictable and cashflow could stop at any moment and might not return for a good few months.
I have no savings, and my parents aren’t in a wealthy enough position to support me (in fact they owe me money). A large, free, overdraft is my safety net and the peace of mind is enough to stop me even thinking about going full monzo for at least the next 2 years.
After that? Impress me. I’m very open to using monzo as my main account. But as many people in this thread have said much better than I will - monzo will never be my only account, in the same way that no account will be my only account. It just makes sense to distribute your finances across a few different banks.
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I went full Monzo in Jan 2020 for most of the reasons @JIMMWX mentions, and with a very similar back story.
Additionally, having come from NatWest who have a long way to go in catching up, Monzo offers so much more in managing my money from month to month. Being able to set up auto processing on my salary the moment it comes in, so that bills are ring fenced off and the ability to split my money into multiple savings pots without having to create separate accounts just feels satisfying and reassuring (not that you can’t do some of this without being 100%).
Going a little deeper, the IFTTT integration has potential to do more, particularly if they can make it more adoptable for daily Monzo users - I see it as more of a “power user” feature at the moment.
This community makes me feel as though this is a bank who is listening and generating new ideas about how banking can work.
I don’t know how much of this means I “should” be full Monzo but I think I like being able to control everything in one place and I feel Monzo does this very well and I believe it will keep getting better.
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@anon70847726 
Really sorry to hear about all the issue 
If you want me to look into/chase anything specific, please let me know 
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Well I did go fullmonzo but now I’ve gone the other way and do mostly everything with NatWest. Here’s why;
You can do nearly everything the same in the app
More or less. Inbuilt budgeting, spending by category & displaying your available balance (albiet as pending, and it can take a few minutes for that to update).
You can set budgets, it will automatically catagorise transactions and you can re-catogorise them if it gets them wrong. You can’t hide budget catagories, and you can only re-catogorise once they’ve cleared
You can view basic transaction details, such as time & merchant, create a PDF summary and chat in app to them. You can’t see logo’s, maps or add notes etc.
You can open a bills account, and savings accounts, but not as easily as Pots. There’s no salary sorter but you can just setup standing orders which essentially do the same thing
Their savings rates are as good
For me they were anyway at the time of writing this. So I have my savings in there now with a SO which updates it each month, you can get 1.5% with the option of instant withdrawals, but you lose interst for that month if you do
I trust them operationally
In many years of banking I’ve never had (apart from with TS 
) any issues. To begin with neither with Monzo. But sometimes in-app chat and wait isn’t enough, neither is the fact that my card can’t stand being used in an ATM, or work with certain card machines, or just plain not be acceptance means I can’t trust it as my only account anymore. I need the option to fallback
It’s the first legacy bank that I’ve seen get to nearly get to Monzo level, but that I can trust
Agree with me or not, but I’ve never fully trusted Monzo. I did go full Monzo but I think I was always going to reverse that decision once a main bank caught up.
So that’s why I have now undone going full Monzo, and am back with a legacy account too
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@anon41219820 thanks, nothing specific to chase. For whatever reason the CASS process didn’t work well for me, I have over 20 DDs on the account (might seem a lot, but I pay various things for my University-aged kids too) and I reckon about a quarter had some kind of problem afterwards, plus some were duplicated, painful but mostly fixed now.
The whole experience has really reinforced why I couldn’t recommend “full Monzo” though, when your main account is servicing payments that affect your credit rating (mortgage, council tax, utilities, etc.) a bank has to be responsive when there are problems. Monzo CS are pleasant when you get a reply, but when you’re getting chased for non-payment a long wait and “we’ll look into it” followed by no response and the ticket being auto-closed two days later isn’t anywhere near ok.
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I’ve never tried Natwest.
Do they have
- Instant balance updating? (by this I mean combination of instant transaction information & instant balance updating, not balance updating only after transactions clear pending status)
- Ability to add notes to transactions?
- Ability to suggest improvements to merchant names?
I’m currently “testing it” by putting the odd transaction though on that card rather that monzo to see what happens.
So far;
Instant Balance - Sort of. It will show the pending transaction within a few minutes of it occuring, and will show under your balance your “available balance” but it still shows the main balance as if the card payment has not been taken yet.
Spending by category - It does do this, however if it get’s it “wrong” you can only correct it once it has cleared pending
Notes - No, no ability to do this. You can however create a PDF of the transaction summary on letter headed paper and query this transaction//open a chat/view basic details.
Ability to improve merchant names/locations etc- no, no ability to do this.
1 Like
It all depends on just how important that feature is? I dare say useful for some but not all.
I’d suggest a running balance feature (as is normal on bank account statement) would be a more useful feature and its requested many times elsewhere on this forum. For example.
It’s about prioritising what you need or want from a bank account and finding one that does that. Sure, Monzo has many features. Some are fantastic, some are half-baked and some are superfluous.
But at least they’re innovating in a way that the legacy banks haven’t for many years. It’s been a catalyst for legacy banks to up their game.
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So after playing around with Natwest a few days here’s where I’m at;
It will be my account for salary, bills & savings
This way I also have a “backup” account should my phone break/need to get money & monzo is down for some reason. (After one time with a legacy bank where I got locked out, I’ve never really been keen on only having one bank tgf) I also get a better savings rate
But Monzo will be used for day to day spending
While the Natwest app does spending by catagory, some info on transactions etc it’s just not as smooth, I’d miss monzo if I closed it down
Looking forward to remaining with Monzo and seeing what the future brings 
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This was my choice for a while rocking the NatWest Reward for salary/DDs and Monzo for monthly spend.
I’ve since swapped to Lloyds Club for the CASS bribe/cinema tickets, and Monzo is now only for fairly rare non-Amex occasions.
The only + I’ve found over NatWest is you can scan cheques in with the app. It also pays interest on balance in your account up to £5k. I’m not overly precious over it so the next time I’m eligible for another bribe I’m off.
HSBC/NatWest competing over £175 switch but you need older than Jan/Oct 2017 and I grabbed one from both in '18. 
Yeah, I only use Monzo as a spending card. Three failed transactions recently (sufficient funds) tells me I’m not ready to make it my primary account.