Monzo, Revolut, Loot, U Account and other fintechs let down by payments processor
Payment outages have caused major problems to cardholders and fintech services provides in the UK and internationally.
A variety of firms, including mobile-only challenger bank Monzo, “neo-bank” Pockit, payments start-up Revolut, smartphone banking firm Loot, U Account (from banking services challenger Ffrees Fiamily Finance), Osper (which provides banking to children) and payments start-up Curve are all reporting issues with their payment processor.
This is understood to be Global Processing Services (GPS). According to Monzo, the processor ran an “unexpected, large migration” that caused the outage.
GPS’s site and Twitter have declined to reveal anything, but there is no shortage of posts by the affected fintech firms.
As one example of this mass outage, Monzo reported the problems on Twitter and kept its users updated.
At 6:31am (UK time) today (6 March), it said things were back to normal.
The other firms all experienced similar issues.
In a blog post, Monzo explains: “Using a third party processor made a lot of sense when we first started our alpha program – connecting directly to payment networks like Mastercard is a long, costly, and complex process, and at the time it didn’t seem like there would be any benefit to our customers from doing this.
“However, over the past year we have reassessed this decision; to ensure we have total control over the customer experience, we need to have a direct connection to payment networks.”
As a result, it will connect its systems directly to Mastercard. When it launches its current account later this year, it will not use a third party card processor and instead transactions will be processed on its own technology.
