Monzo's Double Payday feature gives smaller prizes to lower salaried customers

clairec666

In response to the original post, I agree, it's not very well thought through. There probably wasn't any malicious intent from Monzo, and no deliberate discrimination against low-paid workers. I'm assuming they want to entice people to have their salary paid into their current account, and came up with this gimmick, without properly thinking it through. Offering a £1000 prize to each winner, irrespective of salary, may have been a better option.

I earn a low wage, from two different jobs, and one of them pays weekly, so in the unlikely chance that I'm one of the monthly winners, I won't win anything close to my usual monthly income.

I already get my wages paid into Monzo, and had an email about this salary thing, but hadn't thought anything of it until now; I will gladly send a message to Monzo to point out how they could do things differently.

I've often felt that people with irregular incomes and/or multiple jobs are disadvantaged in lots of ways, e.g. overpayment of National Insurance, difficulty obtaining a mortgage, amongst other things. Not to mention the difficulty in juggling multiple jobs; I recall a very tone-deaf comment from a politician a few years back (can't remember who, but probably a Tory) implying that people on less than 20 hours paid work a week should just get an extra job. Yeah right, they've clearly never been in that situation. I'll always speak out for people in unconventional/irregular work, and although Monzo changing their competition terms won't make a huge amount of difference, it's a start.

dcs34

flaneurs_lobster said:

EarthBoy said:

Rob5342 said:

mwarby said:

Rob5342 said:

mwarby said:

I do find it a bit odd that the type of bank transfer your employer uses matters. As far as I know my employer uses future dated faster payments, certainly never been offered to claim it early(although that's no great loss IMHO)

It's not really odd, a faster payment is completed very quickly and the recipient bank won't have any knowledge of the payment prior to the sender bank sending it. Bacs payments take days to go through so the recipient bank can see it coming days in advance. All banks can see it coming in advance and most wait until the very end day to credit it. Monzo give the option to claim it early because they think it's unlikely to be reversed by that point.

I can see mine coming as a greyed out transaction and if I tap that it gives information about claiming it early. 

I mean it's odd to exclude one type of transfer from the double payroll prize draw, I understand why they can't do the pay early thing

Sorry, I misunderstood your comment. Yes, I can't see what difference the method makes to Monzo as they still end up with the money either way. Maybe it's just easier for them to write their software to look for bacs payments as there will be nowhere near as many of them

If Monzo counted Faster Payments, how would they distinguish salary payments from large transfers being made just to game the system?

I'd turn the question around, why are Monzo trying to identify just salary payments?

Because a current account being used to receive monthly salary payments is generally a good sign that the account is someone's "main" current account for their day-to-day spending, and the whole point of the offer is to encourage people to open and use Monzo accounts for their main account.

In the same way the bank switching offers started asking for Direct Debits and a number of card transactions, presumably because the banks thought this would limit participants to people actually switching their "main" account rather than paying incentives for people just ticking the boxes. However over time more workarounds mean the banks have to become more creative to narrow down to the same subset of customers.