Monzo ‘repeatedly failed customers’ by not sharing data, competition watchdog says
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The competition watchdog has accused Monzo of “repeatedly” failing its customers today after it found the digital lender had failed to share transaction data with people switching banks.
In a statement this morning, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said the London-based bank had breached the Retail Banking Market Investigation Order by failing to share transaction data with 13,000 customers.
“It’s simply not good enough for a major bank like Monzo to repeatedly fail its customers by not following clear rules,”said Adam Land, Senior Director at the CMA.
“Having a record of your financial transactions can act as important evidence needed to secure a loan or mortgage – so Monzo’s failure to provide these put an unnecessary obstacle in the way of thousands of customers.”
The CMA had now ordered the bank to make changes to ensure customers “should not face this issue in the future”.
“We’ll be watching to make sure proper procedure is followed,” Lan added.
The Retail Banking Market Investigation Order was pushed through by the CMA in 2016 to boost competition in the banking sector and ensure bigger and older banks had to work harder to retain customers.
As part of the Order, banks must ensure every customer receives copies of their transaction history when they close their account.
The CMA has issued legally binding directions that require Monzo to review its procedures with an independent body and ensure it does not happen again. The directions are enforceable in court if Monzo fails to comply with them, the CMA said.
Monzo has now set out the initial changes it has made to resolve the issue including introducing new auto-alerts to warn staff when the system fails to issue transaction histories to customers, new monitoring process for cases, and rolling out new procedures to ensure the Order is complied with.
A Monzo spokesperson, said: “Unfortunately, due to a processing error, some customers were not proactively issued with historic transaction data, however this information was always available to these customers at their request.
“As soon as we were aware of this issue, we fixed it on the same day and contacted all impacted customers as soon as possible. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.”