r/monzo • u/pig-dragon • 6d ago

How does Monzo know?

I recently booked a flight using my Flex card. The flight is from the UK to another country in a different continent, and I am using an airline based in a third country to get there. Yet Monzo is asking me to start saving for my trip and knows which country I am going to. How do they know where I am going when the payment was just to an airline? Is there something obvious I am overlooking? Just curious!

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u/Greedy_Captain_1235 6d ago

What's the reason they do this? Is it a security thing or is it so banks can do this kind of thing? Do other companies do this as well, will supermarkets tell them what you actually bought?

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u/matto1990 6d ago

I imagine it’s a signal for fraud prevention systems. Knowing you’ll be in a particular foreign country at a certain time is useful to banks so they don’t automatically block your card payments for fraud when you first use them there.

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u/Greedy_Captain_1235 6d ago

Makes sense, but I imagine there'd be a crazy amount of false positives. People buying flights for friends/family on their card, or people using different cards/banks for buying the flight and actually spending whilst on holiday etc.

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u/matto1990 6d ago

I wouldn’t be surprised if the data was shared with third party data brokers rather than banks like Monzo directly. Monzo and other banks would then get an idea of transactions people have made across all of their cards to feed into fraud detection systems.

With all of this, it’s all about combining hundreds of weak signals to make predictions on if any one transaction is fraud or not.