Will Monzo keep a pre-paid card facility?

[saveen]

Sorry, I have read through your comments again and understand your concerns which I think apply to all debit cards in general in higher risk scenarios.

So what’s the answer? I think there are two arguments:

1. Maybe not 2 sets of cards / card numbers but many like Final.

2. To build better fraud prevention mechanisms and rely on consumer protection for unauthorised payments.

@JamesBell articulates general sentiment around this here:

@JamesBell

I’ve done some work in this area before (considering optional user fraud controls) - this is an area where user preferences vary widely - infact in one of the user research sessions, the user was so unconcerned with fraud they were completely perplexed as to why we would introduce optional fraud controls (“managing fraud is your job, why would i care what authentication levels are there, are you saying your product is insecure?”) - they were also of the opinion with cards/online fraud that it didnt really matter as they could always get the money back from the bank and a new card!

And a solid counterargument to Final’s approach:

@JamesBell

Final are interesting - I do agree that there is a problem with cards but not sure I’d describe it as ‘broken’.

The thing that really matters here is whether there is a sufficiently large market of people for which current card behaviour is such a problem that they are willing to:
a) Consider generating a card number per merchant and
b) Consider switching to a card that allowed them to do that
Personally I’m not sure there is a market there. Just because people have a problem, doesnt mean that they will actually act on it. There will definitely be a set of people that Final will be very appealing to, but will it appeal to a large enough market to make it a successful proposition?

What really matters here is what drives consumer behaviour - its not sufficient to solve a problem - it has to be a sufficiently important problem/unmet need to actually drive action