My card was refused whilst trying to pay for parking on a car park machine.
No idea why as more than enough money in the account.
Maybe i tapped the PIN in incorrectly but who knows…
Could we get a message within the app to show refused/rejected transactions and the reason why?
This would help spot fraud, lost card and trying pin numbers, and also alert of other issues.
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The most likely reason is that the pay machine does not accept prepaid cards 
This will be resolved when 
release their current accounts.
It would be a great idea to see more detail on refused transactions and it is likely it will be the case when the current accounts are rolled out.
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The app actually does display rejected transactions but only when the Monzo service receives any information about it!
For example, you won’t receive any notifications from those parking machines because the machine isn’t even going out to MasterCard and Monzo before rejecting the transaction locally.
You will receive an error notification for failures such as incorrect CVV, incorrect expiry date, suspected fraud (I think? It’s in the future if not working today.), insufficient balance, ATMs that require the magstripe switch in the app to be enabled for security reasons, and some strange merchants that contact Monzo but decline anyway due to bad contactless configuration.
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I believe the specific reason for the failure is that the card requires transactions to be online, but many/most car parking payment machines cannot be online, so they reject the transaction.
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I’ve had notifications when I put the wrong pin in, but not when a pay at pump machine declines it.
As others have said, Monzo can only notify you of the reason if the merchant communicates with them. In a lot of cases a pre-paid card is identified by the machine an rejected outright, with no messages being sent via the Mastercard network. That particular issue should go away with the current account launch.
I’m not sure how different types of card are identified locally though, perhaps it’s encoded on the chip?
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Different card types are identified by their Issuer Identification Number (IIN, previously known as a BIN - Bank Identification Number).
Monzo’s IIN is 535420. All Monzo 16-digit card numbers start with this. If you do a lookup of 535420 on any IIN database, it should show as a UK Mastercard prepaid.
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Yep big issue with all prepaid cards is that, in order to avoid debit balance situations, they are set in the chip to always go online and when a particular terminal can’t go online the terminal itself simply declines the transaction and Monzo never gets to see it. Maybe Monzo will have an offline debit card product once they have a full banking service but then the card controls won’t work. You can mitigate some of the issue through clever EMV scripting but it’s not completely solvable without all terminal going online 100% of the time.
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