Today, when trying to top up my Freetrade account from Monzo, I got the notification that Monzo did not recognise the Freetrade bank account and it could be a scam.
Because I’ve made bank transfers a few times already I wasn’t too worried, but it would be a lot nicer (and less scary for new investors) if Monzo could a) recognise the account, b) actually have the FT logo on Freetrade payments made, and c) an integration with Freetrade.
I appreciate c) is a long shot, so I won’t expect that one to come at least for a long while. But a) and b) would already go a long way.
Hi Rita, welcome to the community!
I’m not sure if its the same thing but most banks nowadays are big on fraud prevention and protecting their customers. So for example even though i have used my linked account to send money to Freetrade several times i still get a similar warning everytime before i get to press ‘send’. I also get similar warnings on my other accounts.
I agree it would be helpful if a regular payee eventually became recognised as legit.
This is probably part of the Confirmation of Payee functionality being brought in by all banks. Ideally if you’ve used the payee previously you shouldn’t get that kind of alert, it should be confined to brand new payees, but I know there is a topic on the Monzo forum discussing this slight overkill.
Been using monzo a while for freetrade and this is only a new thing that has started to happen when sending money. Probably due to new regs etc. Asking if it’s a personal account or business etc as well. Would be nice to be told not to trust freetrade though!
I guess if Freetrade confirms exactly what name is on their nominee account, we can update our bank accounts.
This message shows up as a result of the new confirmation of payee rules - your bank now checks the name you enter in the app matches the bank account you’re sending to. I just use ‘Freetrade’ as the payee name and that doesn’t trigger the fraud warning in my Monzo app.
Monzo’s Confirmation of Payee is broken - and having the Freetrade logo in the Monzo app is something you need to raise with them.
Monzo are also unusual by not maintaining the sort code and account numbers of commonly used firms (credit cards, councils, HMRC) for their customers to select from.
This isn’t just a Monzo thing. Plenty of other banks do the same, and try to warn people that my Monzo bank account may be a scam. Everyone’s on a hair trigger and has their warnings calibrated to the ‘better safe than sorry’ side, it seems (and in some cases, if feels like, ‘better make Monzo look like they might be dodgy, so our customers don’t think of switching’). One would hope that as CoP beds in, this sort of thing settles down.
The one thing that one can geninely ding Monzo on, though, is that there’s a slight bug which means they don’t remember when you’ve paid someone before, so you get the warning every time. This I understand has been confirmed to be a bug, and in future the app should remember if you’ve transferred to an account before.
Yeah just to add, I face the same issue with one of the UK bank incumbents and UK broker incumbent too. Could be the underlying technology used in transaction monitoring that is causing this issue.
Hi all, thanks for coming back to me on this! I was aware of the security Monzo put in place, but it kept reoccurring after approving it the first time which was why I thought it may look more trustworthy if there’d be some sort of pre-approval for Freetrade from Monzo and similar banks.
Someone pointed out (thanks HoldenCarver!) that there’s a bug on Monzo’s side, which explains that.
I also appreciate there is little power Freetrade has to implement this for Monzo. Nonetheless I do think some form of integration between the two (and other challenger banks) could be very promising.
And thanks for welcoming me into the community, I’m enjoying my time on the platform so far!
If you take any money out of freetrade they have TV eh logo already in the app. The freetrade account isn’t called ‘freetrade’ so when what you type and what they hold isn’t identical they show a warning, it is Nothing personal And a useful second to pause and check everything
