Quarter of a million use Monzo gambling block

The UK-based digital bank Monzo says an average of 2,314 customers per week activates the gambling block feature in its app.

UK.- The digital bank Monzo has revealed that 223,000 customers have used its gambling block feature since it was added to the bank’s app in June 2018. The number is about 5 per cent of the bank’s customer base.

Monzo told AltFi that the number of people using the feature more than doubled in the past twelve months.

The gambling block feature in the bank’s app allows customers to block transactions to gambling companies, both online and land-based. It can be disabled again after a 48-hour cooling-off period and discussion with the bank’s support team.

Monzo said that so far this year an average of 2,314 customers per week had activated the feature for the first time. Around 8 per cent of customers who activated the block later disabled it.

The bank said it saw the biggest increase in the use of the feature in August 2019, with 17,474 activations, which it put down to increased media coverage of the mechanism.

When Monzo introduced the feature research carried out with the charity GambleAware predicted that around 5,000 of the bank’s customers would be identified as problem gamblers. 

Last month GambleAware called on more UK banks to introduce gambling blocks, as a report found that about 60 per cent of accounts offered them.

It also called for standardisation of the feature, arguing that many were too easy to turn off.

The charity has drawn up a blueprint for financial organisations to follow to help protect customers at risk from gambling-related harm.