So the news that Monzo has developed a receipts API has had me thinking about a Monzo Marketplace. No, not the platform to integrate products or services from other financial institutions, but a way to expand the functionality of Monzo. Think of it as an app store for Monzo!
I wrote a bit about it here (and pasted below under the fold), but I think it got a bit lost in the financial platform stuff. My thinking has moved on a little, too - the examples here are okay, but not particularly compelling and all a bit in IFTTT territory at the momentā¦
More details and some dodgy designs under here
Platform 2: Functionality!
Money is emotional. People have different habits, different requirements and different ways of managing their hard earned cash. Perhaps some of these are objectively more ācorrectā than others ā but people arenāt always rational when it comes to managing their finances.
Monzo, like any other platform, has finite resources at its disposal. But what would happen if you took a slightly different approach to as platform and, like Facebook, allowed others to extend the platform and develop their own extensions?
Iām by not suggesting a free-for-all (financial services and banks are still heavily regulated, after all) but I have a feeling that, done right, this could be the most disruptive thing anyone looking to disrupt the banking space could doā¦
Think of the app store. Now think of Monzo. With the right APIs and frameworks, developers could code extensions for Monzo (the 1p savings challenge; sweeping money left over at the end of the month to savings, maybe even providing an alternative to Monzo provided functionality like Summary). This would give users greater flexibility and make Monzo an essential (irreplaceable?) part of their financial life ā one thatās personal to them.
This would need investment and management (or ācurationā in tech speak) but done right I see it as a fundamental game changer ā perhaps as much the way that Appleās app store was when it first launched.
Visualising third party functionality in the app
Unlike the financial services marketplace, Iāve chosen to mock-up the marketplace for functionality itself ā mostly because Iām not sure that a lot of the extensions would be visible (how would you see that youāve added a new rule to transfer a pound to charity every time a particular Twitter account tweets, for example?) Where there could be extensions to replace or enhance parts of the Monzo app itself, it felt to me that mocking them up would be to explore the potential for that particular extension rather than the concept of extensions as a whole. So I thought about how the marketplace might look:
- Products would take you to the financial products page with subcategories for savings, investments, insurance ā as well as curated sets of products that would be intended to replace packaged accounts. Think of App Store bundles more than Barclays Blue rewards. Extensions are like micro-apps for the Monzo app itself. Either rules that folk have coded using the API, or potentially replacement for screens wholesale (here, the example is to replace Summary with something for those with weekly income). My Needs is a crude title that needs more work! The concept is that you tell Monzo your outgoings on stuff (or confirm it from what Monzo guesses from your transactions) then it monitors the market and your outgoings to see if you could get a better rate. Itād then either alert you to change or ā with permission ā just do it in the background with a confirmation note your feed.
- The Extensions marketplace may be a way for Monzo to (appropriately) monetise the app. Here, Iām suggesting what are effectively micropayment (expressed in pence rather than pounds) for functionality. But thatād all need to be thought through. I suspect a lot of basic extensions would be done out of love and given away for free. The example of a costed one here is for something more significant ā a replacement of one of the standard Monzo tabs. Monzo may or may not want to take extensions this farā¦
And hereās how one of the extensionsā config screen might look:
Given Monzo has limited resources, would anyone else be interested in a Monzo administered āapp-storeā for add-ons - either as part of the app, or as separate apps/websites that could be authorised per user? Iād be keen to explore whether community members / developers could create things like integration with credit cards, optical character recognition to create receipts from images, an email service to add emails / PDFs as either attachments and/or proper receiptsā¦
Would anyone else find this interesting / useful? Is it a direction Monzo could / should take? What sort of services would you like to see offered by this type of Monzo Marketplace?
