I loved Monzo, until I got robbed in Berlin

All I wanted was to freeze my Monzo card. But without my phone, I was stuck.

One of the first challenges I faced on moving to London in June 2019 was how to get a UK bank account. Despite its reputation as a global financial hub, the UK doesn’t make this easy. That’s because to get a bank account, you typically need proof of a UK address, and to get a UK address, well, it’s a lot easier if you have a UK bank account.

Thankfully, several friends warned me of this immigration catch-22, so before venturing overseas I consulted with a reporter colleague who specialized in banking and fintech. He suggested opening an account with Monzo, the UK neo-bank founded in 2015 and known for its hot coral debit cards. As promised, Monzo was super simple to set up. I was able to open an account and have a debit card issued to me before I even set foot on UK soil, much less had my own residential address.

Moving to a new country is never easy, but as they say in startup parlance, Monzo made the experience more frictionless. In my first few weeks in London, I still relied primarily on my American credit card and bank account, but I found that this, far more than my accent or tendency to get lost and show up 20 minutes late to meetings, gave me away as a newcomer. Amid the throngs who tapped to pay, my American card had to be swiped and signed for, a routine that was normal in New York but felt slow and antiquated in London. Switching to Monzo was like gaining entry to a secret club. Once I started tapping my neon card rather than fumbling with my U.S. one, it became easier to blend into the daily hum of London life.

Initially I had planned to use Monzo only as a stopgap, but Monzo won me over. The app was great, the card was fun, and Monzo itself was fully regulated and covered by the government’s Financial Services Compensation Scheme, which protects accounts up to £85,000 (similar to FDIC insured in the U.S.). It was the perfect blend of legitimacy and millennial branding. I loved Monzo and had only good things to say about it, until I got robbed in Berlin.

An asshole stole my backpack in Berlin

Once I realized a thief had lifted my backpack and, with it, my phone and debit card, my first thought was to freeze my Monzo account. The ease and convenience of tapping to pay—up to £100 in a single transaction and £200 over several before having to enter your PIN, limits UK banks and card providers upped during the pandemic—is all well and good until that spending power is in the hands of a bad actor.

Monzo makes it easy to freeze your card and report it lost or stolen from within the Monzo app. “If you use an app-only bank like Monzo, you can freeze your card at the click of a button!” a 2018 Monzo blog post enthuses. But I didn’t have the app, because my phone was stolen too. From my friend’s phone,

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I Googled how to freeze a Monzo card without app access, which led me to this web page:

Was this article helpful? No Monzo, not really.

As I scanned this help page, it hit me that I’d fallen through the cracks in Monzo’s customer support apparatus. Monzo was set up to help someone who had lost their card but still had access to either their app or email. I had neither. My app was on my phone, which was gone, and my email was locked away behind a layer of two-factor authentication that was impossible to bypass without my phone, computer (also stolen), or other access to my emergency backup codes.

Catch twenty two-factor

“Still stuck,” as Monzo says, I called the help number. The recorded greeting offered no clear option for ‘This is an emergency and I need to speak with a human asap.’ Monzo asked if I had access to the app; I pressed “2” for no. A blandly inoffensive English voice directed me to Monzo’s emergency website. I pressed “1” for “having trouble logging into the app,” which proved a dead end. I tried again, pressing “4” for “something else,” followed by “1” for “if you’ve lost your card or phone.” This time the recording suggested I log into the app from someone else’s phone before conceding that I could stay on the line if I still wanted to speak with someone. “Please note that our phone lines are particularly busy at the moment, and wait times can be near 20 minutes during peak times,” the recording intoned.

🎧 Monzo’s pre-recorded customer service line 🎧

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0:00

-3:15

Despite its quick rise to popularity, Monzo is still a startup. It raised £450 million ($600 million) at a £3.5 billion valuation ($4.6 billion) in December 2021 from investors including Abu Dhabi Growth Fund, Tencent Holdings, Coatue Management, Thrive Capital, General Catalyst, and Accel. While the global unicorn club is no longer exclusive, the UK chapter still is, and Monzo is its 12th-biggest member, according to data from CB Insights. Its competitors include British-Lithuanian fintech Revolut and Goldman Sachs-backed neo-bank Starling. Monzo lost £119 million in the fiscal year ending February 2022 but nearly doubled revenue to £154 million. CEO TS Anil has said the company will be profitable in 2023.

As of February 2022, Monzo had 5.8 million UK customers. It employed nearly 1,900 people, of which just under 1,200 (62%) worked in customer operations (“COps”). Personnel made up Monzo’s single-largest expense that fiscal year, at a cost of £130 million. While it’s unclear what Monzo’s vision is for its customer support team nowadays, in a 2017 blog post the company outlined a goal of employing just one COp per 100,000 users. The current ratio is more like one to 5,000.

I waited on hold with Monzo in the restaurant where I was robbed for 28 agonizing minutes, but no one answered. Then the police arrived, so I crossed my fingers the thief wasn’t actively draining my current account (the UK term for a checking account) and hung up. Back at the Airbnb several hours later, police report in hand, I tried Monzo again. This time I got through to a support rep who secured my account, confirmed there was no suspicious activity, and ordered a new card to my London address.

I was relieved, but I also couldn’t help wondering what might have happened if the thief had used my debit card before I reached Monzo. The company’s official policy is to refund “foreseeable loss and damage,” but it also says customers are liable for “any transactions that are made before you tell your bank your card’s been stolen, up to a maximum of £50.” Would my inability to contact Monzo have made me liable for stolen funds?

The question took me back to a story I’d written for Slate in 2015 about a guy who had $2,850 stolen from his bank account via Venmo. Founded in 2009, Venmo at the time was the hottest fintech app in the U.S. It let friends pay friends straight from the digital wallet on their phones, a small miracle for anyone used to fumbling with cash and cocktail-napkin math to split a bill.

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Digital payments stalwart PayPal had absorbed Venmo in 2013 as part of a broader acquisition, but let it keep operating like a startup to preserve its hip factor. Because where PayPal was a digital dinosaur, Venmo was cool.

While Venmo’s startup ethos made it an instant hit with millennials, it also lacked some basic security mechanisms. Whoever stole $2,850 from Chris Grey’s account was able to do so in part because Venmo never notified Grey that someone had changed his email and password settings, or that a large Venmo transfer had been made (he found out when he got a notification from his linked Chase Bank account).

Once he wised up to the fraud, Grey made several unsuccessful attempts to contact Venmo, which told customers to reach it by email or Twitter. There was no phone line. Chase, not Venmo, ultimately reimbursed Grey for the stolen funds. A few years later, PayPal settled FTC allegations that Venmo had misled consumers about how its app transferred funds and the level of security it provided consumer accounts. The FTC specifically cited Venmo’s lack of user notifications for account changes and inadequate customer support, as well as instances of customers who were defrauded by scammers who exploited Venmo’s rules around business transactions, both issues I first reported.

I thought about these Venmo stories as I struggled to reach Monzo that night in Berlin. “One of the great promises of a credit card is the small customer service number printed on the back,” I’d written in 2015. “Venmo doesn’t offer that level of assistance.” Monzo had a phone line, but it had proven confusing to navigate and difficult to reach when I needed it. Like Venmo, the Monzo user experience was frictionless until it suddenly wasn’t.

My new Monzo card arrived shortly after I got back to London, but for some reason the pull-tab on the envelope was open. This seemed bad, so I called Monzo again and asked them to send a replacement. In the meantime, I fell back on my American credit card. The replacement replacement Monzo card arrived a few days later. I opened the envelope, thankfully intact this time, and contemplated the single-line instruction to “Activate your card in the Monzo app.”

I was using an old iPhone 5 my neighbors had loaned me until I could replace mine. The iPhone 5 worked, barely. It charged up but lost power quickly. It seemed dismayed at being unearthed from its drawer, and every few minutes the touchscreen would freeze in protest. It was also running a much older iOS and unable to support the latest version of most apps. It was, I told my friends, like having your grandmother as your crisis manager. It wanted to help, but it needed a lot of breaks.

I opened the App Store, not optimistic. The phone offered to download an older version of Monzo. When the app displayed a welcome screen and asked me to enter my email, I allowed myself a brief moment of hope before hitting continue. “⚠️ Update your operating system,” the screen flashed. “We don’t support your device’s operating system any more. Please update it to keep using Monzo.”

I clicked “Find out more” and was redirected to a web page explaining that for security reasons, Monzo users should keep their phone software up to date. The current app requires a minimum of iOS 13.0, which a quick Google confirmed was a nonstarter for an iPhone 5. Irina Sukhikh, a Monzo spokesperson, later said by email that “it is a standard practice for most banks to support only certain versions of operating systems to ensure smooth running of mobile banking features and minimise security risks.”

The welcome leaflet offered no other option for activating my card, and further Googling established it couldn’t be done over the web. Once again, I phoned Monzo. I explained the situation to the support rep, James (all British men are named James), who said Monzo “would always ask that you try to activate on the app” but as that wasn’t possible in my case, I could send a selfie to help@monzo.com and they should be able to help me further. Being told to email a selfie to a support inbox to regain access to my own bank account was more than I could bear. I hung up and resolved to keep using my U.S. card. A week later, I was able to log back into Monzo and activate my card using the app on a friend’s iPad.

The entire experience with Monzo left me unnerved. It was the sort of thing I expected from a renegade fintech, not a fully authorized UK bank. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) regulates UK banks and sets the standard of care that firms owe to customers in retail financial markets. The latest guidance on this “Consumer Duty,” published July 2022, includes specific discussion of the support channels a digital bank like Monzo should provide. Sections 9.17 and 9.18 note that while a firm “could design a product with a digital-only support offering that… meets the needs of a specific tech-savvy target market,” it should also be prepared to deal with “non-standard issues” like “security or fraud concerns, technical issues, or other more complex or sensitive customer journeys” as well as “customers with changing needs”:

Customers with changing needs. Firms should also be mindful that anyone, including those who are tech-savvy, can become vulnerable either temporarily or permanently. If a customer’s circumstances change it could mean that limited channel(s) of support no longer meet their needs. For example, a customer in financial difficulties could lose internet or mobile access meaning that a digital-only support offering exposes them to the risk of harm.

An FCA spokesperson declined to comment on the record, but pointed to expectations around customer support in the Consumer Duty, like having alternatives to in-app support in case a customer can’t access their phone. The spokesperson also noted that the FCA has guidance on how firms should treat customers in vulnerable situations, which could include victims of a crime.

Monzo, asked why it didn’t have better emergency support for customers unable to access the app or web portal, pointed me back to the same Monzo emergencies help page I had already consulted and reiterated that customers could freeze their card at web.monzo.com or contact customer service by phone or email. “Calls from customers that chose the option to report their card stolen are prioritised by the customer service team to ensure a swift response,” Sukhikh wrote. This may be true, but you have to go several layers into Monzo’s phone support menu before you are offered that choice in the first place. The option could be made clearer and much more prominent.

On the fifth page of its annual report, Monzo lays out its company values. They include “building a bank for everyone” and “always do what’s best for customers.” These are good values, but they’re hard ones to stand by when your service relies on digital connectivity as much as Monzo’s does. If, as the FCA says, you design a product with primarily digital support that “meets the needs of a specific tech-savvy target market,” then you aren’t actually building a bank for everyone, you’re building a bank for a specific, tech-savvy market.

I’m part of that tech-savvy market, and like most Monzo users, I understood I was signing up for a digital bank, one with no branches or Monzo ATMs to deposit checks at (you have to mail them to a PO box). But because Monzo promotes its status as a regulated bank, I always assumed the digital technology was backstopped by sufficient human support. It was shocking to realize I couldn’t easily shut off my card once I lost access to my personal devices. It was awful to spend hours imagining a thief draining money from my account, one tap at a time, while I waited to reach Monzo by phone.

I still like Monzo. The hot coral card still feels like a badge of membership. But I no longer love or trust it. From now on, I’m using my Monzo account the way I use Venmo, as a digital wallet for everyday expenses. I’m keeping most of my savings in my boring high street bank account, where they always answer the phone.

1. Shoutout to Chandler, who lent me her phone and then later pulled the phone records for a crucial reporting assist. If you’re in SF, check out her extremely cute store post.script.

2. I know this sounds crazy to UK and European readers, but yes, in the U.S., waiters will not happily split your bill among everyone at the table, nor is it standard procedure to pay your friends by digital bank transfer. Venmo was a real breakthrough.