Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kn100 15 days ago
Hey, Monzo's Sort code, the first one to my knowledge to start with a zero. I spent six months unable to pay my council tax bill because their stupid system was treating the sort code as an integer and therefore dropping the leading zero, on the backend, before
1 comments
kn100 15 days ago
Hey, Monzo's Sort code, the first one to my knowledge to start with a zero. I spent six months unable to pay my council tax bill because their stupid system was treating the sort code as an integer and therefore dropping the leading zero, on the backend, before validating that it had six digits. At one point they asked me if I'd be willing to sign up for a different bank.
link
ralferoo 15 days ago
Not sure about whether it's the first to have a leading zero or not. Certainly the -04 at the end suggests it was one of the first in the 04- block, but then again most banks have multiple sort codes, so who knows.

I'm not really sure how these get allocated, but looking through some of my payment recipients, Revolut is also lowish in this block with 04-00-67, but also with leading zeros, Santander has 09-01-32 and 09-01-33, co-op has 08-92-99, Nationwide has 07-01-16, 07-08-06, 07-19-86.

That looks to me almost like potentially a bank can get a sort code block as large as just the first 2 digits, e.g. Nationwide which has been around for a long time and all seem to start 07-. But that doesn't explain then why Monzo and Revolut are both in the 04-00- block.

EDIT: it seems that sort codes are assigned by pay.uk [1] and Wikipedia has a surprising amount of information [2]. Most interestingly, originally banks were 2 digits long, and so each bank had their own 2 digit prefix, and the single digit banks had a zero appended, so e.g. NatWest was originally Westminster (6) and became 60-. There's a whole load of 04- sort codes for "Utility Banks" [3] and Monzo seems to have been the second such bank (BFC is before it, but 04-00-01 is unlisted, so maybe Monzo was the third).

[1] https://www.wearepay.uk/what-we-do/payment-systems/access-to...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sort_code

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sort_code#04_codes

link