Well the whole reason we’re having this conversation is that having lots of customers didn’t magically translate to making more money. That’s the point I’m making. I see way too many startups out there focusing on growth but then it’s crickets and radio silence when it’s time to turn the ship back around and actually make money.
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Which comes back to my initial point. If they made Monzo more accessible then them customers that didn’t create magical income would of made them more revenue. You want people to go full Monzo not partially because they have to keep a legacy account open for some everyday banking.
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I’m always amazed at how fortunate we are on this forum to have so many experts at running a bank, but also surprised that there aren’t more fintechs out there run by these people, given how easy it clearly is.
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Yes, I totally agree with this. I however think that in its current state they should try to win over the existing customers they have (that might not be #FullMonzo yet) instead of yet again doing a heavy push on marketing to get even more people in the door.
They already have close to 4 million (or maybe they passed that? haven’t kept up with the news around here) customers in the door, to me it would seem better and less risky to try and “convert” them (to a more profitable offering) since the cost of acquiring them (both in marketing as well as operations & logistics; AML/KYC, producing and sending out cards) has already been spent than to reach out for completely new customers which again involves a fixed cost (sending them a card at the minimum) without any guarantee they’ll end up profitable.
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Have you ever heard the saying “the customer is always right”?
The points people are making are how their experience has been. If people adopt the mentality that they don’t know how to run a bank then you will never improve.
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You do know that was a marketing slogan, and it’s not actually the way you run every business, don’t you?
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which businesses would fall in the category of customer’s are always right then?
so many experts at running a bank, but also surprised that there aren’t more fintechs out there run by these people
Just because we don’t know how to run a bank doesn’t mean we can’t call out what we think are mistakes and learn from it if we end up being corrected/proven wrong by how things unfold in the end.
Regarding running a fintech (or any kind of company for that matter), if you told me “hey let’s raise millions to make a company with no clear path to profitability” I would run away immediately. I applaud the courage (or is it recklessness?) of those who try it, but I personally don’t want to be involved and have my money on the line. But then again, it’s just my personal opinion and it’s clear there are people out there with both more money and a higher risk appetite that are happy to take that gamble.
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Yes, and it’s complete bulls**t.
That attitude also led to an increased number of attacks on service workers (I can’t find it now, but there was recently a news article about this).
Honestly, so many of the arguments in this thread are so facile or asinine that it’s exhausting just thinking about them. Time for me to leave this thread. 
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None.
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While the balance is somewhere in the middle, Plus would have been making money for many many months by now had they actually built what they were told people wanted. But they were arrogant, thought they knew best, and it backfired… multiple times. It isn’t as clear cut as Monzo = always correct and customers = always wrong.
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The one thing I was surprised about is how the loans/overdraft offering kept varying significantly for customers. I can understand why Monzo Plus had issues, which have only been exagerrated by Coronavirus. But loans and overdrafts really are bread and butter financial products.
Given that Monzo arguably have better, more detailed information on their customers than the average bank you would expect more customers to see preapproved overdraft and loan offers, which were consistently available over time, or at least only changed every month or so. My old bank Barclays used to have preapproved loan and overdraft offers sitting there when I logged in. It’s strange that I can login to the likes of Clearscore and see a list of preapproved or 95% guaranteed finance offerings, yet there are no similar credit offers showing to me through Monzo.
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Exceptional circumstances call for exceptional solutions. When it comes to labour, there seem to be precious few attempts to step outside the box.
It’s not enough to say “exceptional circumstances”.
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Lower capitalisation. A bank can’t lend out money it doesn’t have. Monzo’s rates were always conservative as a result. In some cases rate might have dipped slightly not because of anything the customer did, but because customer take-up elsewhere meant Monzo had to lower offers to not lend too much in total. Then Coronavirus came along and banks were looking at being on the hook for potentially huge amounts of bad debt - I think it was Lloyds who said their last year’s profit had basically been wiped out at a stroke - so I wasn’t at all surprised that the Monzo offers nosedived after that.
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I was waiting for someone to get technical 
My defence is, and I’m sure you actually understand this, I was simplifying for the sake of being clear and readable. Seemed better to do that than go for a long and complicated explanation that could confuse people and/or fall in the tl;dr bucket.
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Made me think of this NPR podcast
Planet Money: Where’d The Money Go, And Other Questions https://www.npr.org/2020/06/03/869079549/whered-the-money-go-and-other-questions
I want to disagree with the original poster (as I largely do disagree with him) but he does make some good points.
Why hasn’t Monzo Plus been relaunched yet? I signed up for Monzo Plus just to give Monzo some money and many others were happy to as well.
If Monzo genuinely believe this to be a temporary cash-flow issue, rather than a fundamental mis-structuring of the business then it seems dumb to dump talent. Monzo could easily raise the money needed to cover staff for another 6 months or so from crowdfunding/the wider community.
I think the fact that Tom has gone suggests the business was on a pretty bad footing pre-covid. They can’t really blame losing interchange fees due to covid for the issues since a) customer spending probably hasn’t radically decreased and b) interchange fees were on the way out anyway and Monzo have long acknowledged they need to make money elsewhere.
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They are ready to launch but launching with loads of travel options isn’t a good idea right now.
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It should have been relaunched by now, but was delayed under the guise of COVID. Either a convenient excuse given that they were able to launch business accounts under the same economic conditions, or it means insurance is a heavily featured component of both plus offerings, rather than an add on, which after the N26 Debacle, likely means quite a lot of people wont be eligible for them anyway, which will be a shame because I was looking forward to a better version of plus.
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