App-only bank Monzo. Monzo LONDON — A number of UK fintech startups encountered technical issues on Thursday, warning customers that their payments may not go through.

App-only banks and firms including Monzo, Revolut, Loot, Starling Bank, and Curve all ran into problems due to a supplier that provides some of their underlying technology.

As of around 11AM, the issue appeared to be fixed.

Monzo, which does not operate any physical branches, currently offers its customers a pre-paid debit card, and plans to launch a current account. "Please take another card with you today — the Monzo card is currently being declined," it warned in a push notification.

"As you may have noticed, card payments, top ups and transfers have not been fully functional since 7:45 this morning. One of our suppliers is having issues and investigating as a high priority." (It is also updating customers via its Status page.)

Foreign exchange card provider Revolut is also reporting its supplier has technical problems. "Our payment processor is experiencing technical issues, which may cause card payments to fail. We'll provide an update as soon as possible!" it wrote on Twitter.

All-in-one card Curve, too, is warning its users of technical issues.

As is Loot, a money management startup:

Digital bank Starling Bank wrote on its status page that some users had also experienced issues: "We're sorry that some people have been experiencing issues with their cards this morning, which we’re working on as we speak."

Digital bank Monese wasn't affected, however, and took to Twitter to brag that its services were still all operational.



A similar technical issue affected Monzo, Loot, Curve, and Revolut back in March 2017. At the time, Monzo wrote a blog post explaining what was happening (emphasis ours):

"During our prepaid alpha and beta, all Monzo transactions go via another company called a 'card processor.' A card processor sits between our systems and the Mastercard network, and because all our transactions go via them, their systems must be available at all times for our cards to work. When they are down, we are down, as unfortunately happened today. Our own systems remain online, but until the card processor is repaired, we are effectively disconnected from Mastercard and are unable to approve any transactions."

Two sources told Business Insider that partner company Global Processing Services (GPS) is again behind the problem.

These outages aren't unique to digital challenger banks. Barclays' online services went down on the 3rd and 4th of July, according to monitoring service Down Detector. Nationwide also experienced technical issues on Wednesday, The Register reported.

Additional reporting by Oscar Williams-Grut.