New bank Monzo has continued its development with a range of new features, including a way to pay friends and a new security feature for when travelling abroad, among other additions.
The new Friends feature, which is initially available on the Monzo iPhone app, allows you to see which of your contacts also uses Monzo – with the number of users now over 70,000, it’s becoming more likely that some of your friends will start to use it – and with those friends that do, you’re able to make payments, split bills etc within the app using the balance in your account.
Monzo are keen to stress the security behind this feature; both you and your contact must enable payments for them to appear as an available contact, and a minimum of data is sent to Monzo’s servers before the process of sending the money.
A second new feature brings the magnetic stripe (“magstripe”) on the back of your card in to action should you need to use it. Most ATMs in the UK use chip and PIN rather than the magstripe, but in other countries the use of the magstripe can still be the only way to get cash from a machine. Monzo generally disable the magstripe, but the new update allows you to temporarily enable it should you need to.
The final change to the app gives you more control over notifications. Monzo’s mobile notifications were one of the first features I noticed about the app. As soon as you withdraw money from an ATM or make a payment in a shop, you get a notification pop up on your mobile – these are so instant, they often come through before you’ve even taken your cash or been given your receipt. If this functionality isn’t for you though, you can now turn notifications off, so you won’t receive them when you make a succesful purchase, a declined purchase or have any other Monzo “news feed” item.