One gets the feeling they're hiding behind the "we can't tell you why" excuse to escape accountability for a broken system that's literally ruining lives.
How do you know the scale and how are you not sure that it's a vocal minority? After all, Monzo does target more tech-savvy users that might be more likely to voice their frustration online than with other high-street banks.
> One gets the feeling they're hiding behind the "we can't tell you why" excuse to escape accountability for a broken system that's literally ruining lives.
Because maybe they are being forced to hide behind that? UK banking regulations are notoriously strict when it comes to what banks are allowed to share with their customers.
Read the articles and look for similar experiences for other banks. There's definitely a lot more noise about Monzo doing it. Maybe (as another comment suggested) there's a selection bias at work but I assure you it's a real thing, and appallingly handled by Monzo when it happens.
> Because maybe they are being forced to hide behind that?
That misinterprets what I said. If there are rules that say they don't have to be accountable for a misfiring fraud prevention system that hurts real people, where is the incentive to fix it?
If that's the case, it's fairly obvious why there'd be a lot more noise - a lot larger percentage of people in that age group doing crypto, and a larger percentage are "very online" and likely to complain about it there.
Statistically it doesn't seem likely that Monzo and its ilk would be so overrepresented merely because their customers are more fazed than others about having their money taken away. Still, if the FCA have published meaningful statistics I could be proved wrong.
https://www.which.co.uk/news/2021/09/why-banks-are-freezing-...
This in turn means that they will have their risk assessments inverted from the usual high-street banks: optimise signup/account creation flow, and deal with AML requirements in a slightly delayed fashion. Making it really easy and smooth to open a current account brings in a surprising fraction of the crowd who would be rejected or otherwise earmarked by high-street banks.
Being digital upstarts, these modern banks also don't have the fraud and risk departments their established competition has. In order to not get hammered by the FCA, they almost certainly veer on the blunt instrument side when dealing with suspicious activity. And law of large numbers guarantees that there will be a significant number of false positives.
This, I should add, at a time when there was a high incidence of fraud with people trying to open business accounts for dormant and non-existent companies simply so they could claim Govt backed loans where it was clear that very few checks were actually being carried out.