What's up you guys, sasha here now i have a slightly unusual video today, because i have had a deluge, a huge number of reports on my channel and other reports that i've seen on social media from monice customers. Now, specifically, these reports and all the comments on my channel are saying that there are a lot of customers affected by monies blocking their accounts or freezing them. As a result, customers do not have access to their accounts, they cannot have access to their money and these blocks and these freezes of accounts leave customers without that access. Apparently, according to some of these reports for several weeks at a time now for full transparency, i personally have not had any of these issues.

I have not had any issues with my account being blocked or closed or frozen, or anything like that. So all of this is based purely on the comments and posts that i have seen from other monies. Customers here is a really important disclaimer. I do not know, and i cannot confirm the veracity of all of these comments and these various posts, and these various mentions that i'm seeing in social media.

I do not know these people, i don't know how many people are genuinely being affected, whether there's some kind of disproportionate effect happening, whether there are bots or whether there is some malicious activity, marketing activity led by muniza's competitors that is trying to discredit them. I do not know, and all of these could be the case. It could be that i'm completely wrong. It could be that the information that i have is hugely incomplete because i'm a tiny youtube channel with very limited reach.

I have very very few people watching my videos and even fewer leaving comments. So all of this is based purely on anecdotal evidence. Another critical thing is that i am not a lawyer. I am not some kind of expert in financial regulation, so all of the content in this video is purely based on my personal opinion and may well be very wrong.

So please go and do your own research before formulating any proper finalized views on this now. The truth is because my channel is all about bank accounts, challenger banks, comparing different ones, doing reviews and all types of things like that. I actually get quite a lot of comments like this all the time i get them all the time from all kinds of banks. Sometimes from high street bank customers, sometimes from customers of other major banks, for example, monzo had an issue that was in some way similar to this.

Earlier this year, when there was an uptick, there was a sudden increase in the number of people complaining about very similar things. Their accounts were also being blocked and frozen and people were not having access to their money. So this is not some kind of exclusive problem that is only affecting my knees, but over the last few weeks the number of complaints that i am seeing from manis customers has increased massively. It has increased way way more than any other increase i have seen before and at the moment, over the last two to three weeks, i've been getting far more complaints from minis customers than all the other banks in the uk combined now, let me quickly cover some Numbers just so that it might be a bit easier to understand, potentially what the relative size of the problem could be.

In january 2020 monies reported they passed. The 2 million sign ups mark now. This is really important. Everyone else talks about customers and when these talk about signups - and that is because not all of these signups are going to be existing active customers - not all of them are even going to be existing customers.

Some people, maybe who signed up in the past, may no longer be customers. I am one of those people. It could well be that i am misunderstanding, the terminology, but, as i understand it, the two million mark that they have reported is the total number of people who have ever signed up for their product, whether or not they are still a customer of monies. But that's still quite a formidable number, but the really important thing to note here is because money operates across europe in different markets and in different countries.

A relatively small proportion of that total number are going to be uk based compared to the likes of stalin and monzo, who are 100 percent uk based at the moment. Now many do not report what the total number of uk based customers is, or the total number of customers overall is - or at least i can't find that information very easily. But what i do know is that, given that the two million mark includes everyone, who's ever signed up and all the factors i mentioned, and the fact that i'm only really going to be reached by people who are english speaking, potentially people who live in the uk Or maybe watch uk channels, it's going to be a small subset of the overall monies portfolio. As i understand it, this is the concern.

The concern is that, at the same point, styling have 1.8 million accounts, actual customers on their books. Monso have passed four million earlier. This year and in all likelihood, are probably at roughly five million customers. Already revenues have been growing fast and even some high street banks have actually managed to be growing in this time period.

Nationwide is one good example of that, and given all of that, the fact that i am exclusively receiving complaints about this issue with moniz, far more than any of the others put together kind of begins to sound like there is a disproportionate issue happening now. Let me cover something that is important to understand in the situation. It is true, and it is correct that in the uk, banks are legally obligated to block accounts or close accounts, depending on the circumstances where they suspect some kind of suspicious activity. And it is also true that if that were to happen.

So if a bank goes and blocks an account for that reason, then if a customer attempts to find out what's happening, if a customer contacts them, the bank will not provide them any reasons for anything, they will refuse to communicate with them, because any information the bank May provide to the customer may be seen as tipping off now. It is correct the banks, financial services companies should not tell customers when their accounts are being investigated. For these reasons, because if the customer was ever to find out that they're being investigated, they may go and close all their other accounts or switch their fraud activity or money launching activities to some other channels and avenues. So i completely understand that, and i get that - and i understand that this is something that the bank technically has to do well.

Manis is not actually a bank. They like to position themselves as an alternative to traditional challenger banks, so apologies for using that word not in his proper way. Now i do appreciate the ridiculousness of the situation. If you go and contact your bank or financial services company and ask them why exactly your account is blocked and they refuse to provide any information, there's pretty much, only one reason why it could be, and that is because of this type of investigation.

So it's a bit of a futile reason because in any other case, if there's some kind of technical problem with your account or something else, they would tell you. So it's not like the people being investigated. Don't know why exactly their accounts are being blocked, but that's besides the point, i'm not here to argue whether the legislation should be changed. We're talking about something quite different now here is the main point of this video and my main problem with monies and actually some other banks that deal with this in the same way, and that is the law does stipulate that if the bank or financial services company Detects that there are some kinds of suspicious activity on the account, then the account has to be blocked and the issue has to be investigated, but that very same law in no way specifically and exactly prescribes what the definition of suspicious activity is.

Although there are some tenets and some things that say what types of things the banks and finances companies should be looking out, for, it doesn't exactly stipulate that these are the exact parameters that the customer's account has to hit. In order for you to classify that behavior. As suspicious - and this is my main problem, the decision that is being taken for how the suspicious activity is defined is exclusively done by the financial services company. It is nothing to do with the regulation, so when banks, financial services companies go and hide behind regulation and say well, it's not us.

The law says that we have to do this. It is completely not true, because they get to decide in which cases this law actually gets used, they get to decide which activities classes are suspicious and if their systems and processes are simply not good enough, if their systems and processes fail in identifying correctly, where the Suspicious activity is which activity suspicious and which isn't then, that is not prescribed by law. That is a failure by the company and should be acknowledged as such. Now with monzo, there seemed to be a disproportionate effect of people being blocked because they either went and bought.

Bitcoin or in some cases they gambled in other cases, they went and opened up investment accounts and moved money from monster to those accounts and then back from those accounts to monzo when they were trading and those types of activities triggered. These fraud warnings and people's accounts were blocked for long periods of time, and that is also anecdotal. I don't know for sure, because i don't work at monzo and i haven't seen the full data set, but this is just based on some of the communication that i had with people who were in these issues, and i asked them a few questions and i got Very commonly an answer of yes, i did that to one of those three things with my knees. I don't have that level of information at the moment i am not sure exactly what's happening, but one thing that is looking relatively likely, given the number of cases of people sending these messages through, is that something is going on and something is not working correctly and It is also looking like to me, like the company, is failing to acknowledge it or take any responsibility in my personal opinion that is in no way legally sound or has any kind of backing.

I think hiding behind the legal framework as the excuse for why your company sucks at doing something is a really weak thing to do now. I actually did reach out to my knees before making this video. I informed them of my observations and i said exactly what i was going to make the video about and why i was going to make it and to their credit. They went and supplied a comment and they went and supplied some clarifying information really really quickly.

As i requested, which is, unlike some other companies that i've dealt with in the past, so that is incredibly helpful. But let me read you exactly what their official statement says. So the manis spokesperson officially said we continuously monitor all accounts to keep our customers safe. Any suspicious activity can result in the freezing or closure of a customer's account.

This only affects a small number of customers. Blocking accounts is a legal requirement and as a regulated financial services provider, we have a duty to detect and prevent financial crime. Due to our regulatory obligations, we cannot disclose the individual circumstances regarding the freezing or closure of an account. Now they also did provide me with some additional bullet points which aimed to clarify that position.

They specifically said that allowing accounts to be frozen or closed is part of their terms and conditions. They also said that, for regulatory reasons, they cannot tell customers why their account is frozen or closed, because it is a legal offence. Lastly, they also said that whenever they do close an account, they try to act promptly and return any available balance to a customer as soon as possible. I quoted that last bit note the word: try and absolutely no mention of any expected or projected timelines.

This statement sounds incredibly weak to me now. All of this sounds incredibly generic and iffy. I literally got absolutely no value or benefit in understanding the situation other than getting a bunch of really standardized. Legalese jargon that absolutely in no way acknowledges the problem does not in no way say that there is a problem and it doesn't really say anything other than stuff that i already knew now.

Although monies is regulated by the fca, they are not a bank and, as a result, they're not regulated in the same way as other banks like, for example, stalin or monzo, and combined with the fact that their customer service is really quite poor. And i actually referenced this in the review that i did of monies, and i personally have experienced it several times when i was closing my account because of how much i disliked it. It took a considerable amount of effort. I had to contact their customer service repeatedly and the process was incredibly painful and took far far longer than it should now.

I know again, this is purely anecdotal. This is just me. This isn't some kind of representative view on the millions of customers that they apparently have, but given that i time and time again see and experience incredibly poor way of dealing with customers, perhaps the fact that they are dealing with these other customers in a poor way. As well is not surprising now, once again, i don't actually know what's happening with monies.

I do not know if this isn't anywhere representative if this is actually an issue or if i'm just getting a disproportionate number of the people who have had their accounts blocked for genuinely good reasons contacting me, because i'm the only channel that happens to be talking about Challenger banks - i don't know all of these - could be the truth, but from the opinion that i'm forming based on the evidence that i have, which is limited, i think it is an incredibly poor effort. I think hiding behind some kind of legal jargon when there is an actual issue failing to acknowledge the issue, failing to actually then go and solve the issue failing to actually care about your customers, who maybe don't have the money to go and feed their family to Go and pay for their heating bill to be able to go and buy basic needs in the middle of a cold december. In the run-up to christmas, in the middle of a pandemic, i think not giving a monkey is about the fact that these customers may be feeling hurt and maybe being unfairly affected by your actions is a really poor way to do business and the beauty of these Types of thing are that they come back to bite you, because if this does get in the hands of regulators, if this gets any further and customers, complaints escalate to the financial ombudsman, service and elsewhere, where these customers can go if they feel like their treatment, is Not correct and not appropriate, the ramifications can be huge. It can go all the way through to moving licenses and going down the legal route.

I'm not saying that any of this is going to happen. What i'm saying is that people should think a little bit more carefully about how their customers actually lead their lives about what's important to them and how these types of activities actually affect them. They're not just digits in the computer they're, not just some kind of numbers and statistics, they're real customers with real issues, and they really need to be treated as such. If you are a nice customer and you've been affected by this, please please please, go and leave a comment below and tell me as much as you possibly can, if you're watching this and you're from manis - and you want to come back with a statement that isn't Just a load of generic blah blah and you want to actually specify whether or not you think there is an issue whether you are working on anything.

Whether maybe there are any kind of mitigating circumstances or whether you feel you are being unfairly attacked by a third party or something else that would be of any kind of informational value. Please go and send me an email go and get in touch via the comments. Go and get in touch by whatever means works for you and if i get anything meaningful or anything that actually genuinely helps with this understanding or maybe something that completely changes my perspective and completely changes my opinion on this, i will go and pin it in the Pinned comment below so make sure you go and check that out in case something actually comes through in the meantime. I hope you guys found this useful if you have make sure you go and smash the like button future algorithm.

Thank you so much for watching and i'll see you guys later. You.