Firstly great summary of 140 odd posts 
I have to ask though, why do you feel monzo is unsafe despite the FSCS protection?
I suspect not many of us ever actually used FSCS to recover money from a failed bank and are not familiar with the process. Even though I’m confident you will recover your money eventually, it could still cause a lot of issues to lose access to your money for a few weeks unless you have more of it in an instant access savings account, especially in these difficult times.
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I agree, but they aim for seven days after date of failing 
For the record, this is all personal feeling, so please take with all the pinches of salt in the world. 
Actually, there have been a few “good” news stories in the banking world (if you can call it that), with the likes of Barclays, Lloyds and HSBC halting their planned job cuts.
Though, despite the previous good feeling towards Monzo, they’ve not shined very bright at all at a time I would have expected them to step up in a big way.
Probably, because they have business to run, but that has always been the case - I guess it’s a little sobering to see the results of a bank that has struggled to monetise its products.
Regarding the FSCS protection - Like Andre says, I’m confident I’d get my money back, but I can’t imagine it would be a smooth, stress free process.
I think it would be a bit of a nightmare!
Note - The point is…I shouldn’t need to even think of that (and I appreciate not everyone will be thinking of this).
Compare that with the other banks, and I wouldn’t be concerned if I had a Barclays, Nationwide, Lloyds or HSBC account - Even if they had to make 1000’s of redundancies - The thought they might go bust would never occur to me (naively, perhaps).
Every time I see those banks in the news, I (perhaps wrongfully), figure it’s a tiny percentage of the overall company.
I’ll be brutally honest, Monzo is still my main bank because Barclays either needed my wife to go into branch to add her to my account, or she needed to open a Barclays account online before we could change my account into a joint one.
Which, ironically, is the reason I’m with Monzo - The fact you can do everything from an app, with no need for branches and desktops is the single factor that pushed me to an app based bank.
That being said, it’s a balancing act, and I no longer feel Monzo is suitable for my personal situation. The longer I’ve spent with a “FinTech”, the more I’ve realised that my very basic needs are catered for with a legacy/high street bank, with the added bonus of having a competent customer service team and a lack of concern over the direction of the bank.
I’ve said all along that Monzo (and other FinTechs) will need to innovate quickly in order to “stay ahead of the competition”. I was always told (by staff) that their fleet of foot and ability to roll out updates would keep them ahead of the, to coin a phrase from an old forum user here, “legacy rust”.
What I’ve actually seen over the past 2 years, is the High Street banks close the gap in quite a dramatic way. Better apps, sleeker processes, instant notifications in some case.
So yeah, perhaps a little more than you wanted, but just thought I’d add some context.
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Pedantic, sure. But they are not halting, they are pausing. These mass job cuts are still going to happen and probably on a larger scale than originally planned.
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Yep. This sums up my thoughts.
As to whether or not we’ll need the FSCS protection, I doubt that Monzo will ‘fail’ as such. I suspect that the worst that could happen is that we find that the branding might change to ‘Monzo by Barclays’ or some such.
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Halting is typically used in a temporary context, it’s synonymous with pausing, so I’m unsure of what point you were trying to make there.
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This is the main point for me also, what got me to love monzo and frequent this forum so much was they were always innovating and pushing the boundaries.
The pace has massively slowed since the push for plus/us/business accounts. My legacy now almost matches monzo for features which is crazy to think.
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It means stop doesn’t it?
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Sorry, I should have said “paused” to stop any confusion.
Incidentally, I thought “halt” would give the same meaning.
Moreover, the point was that these other banks are setting a better example.
Other than the fact Monzo have always prided themselves, on being staff friendly… And for whatever reason, it doesn’t appear to be that way right now (based on the forum and twitter).
None the less, I hope everyone at Monzo is going to come out of this in a good way!
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It does yes, but the context in which it is often used is a temporary one (I.E. stop temporarily). The context matters here, because halt is also a synonym for pause alongside stop.
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The ONLY reason I’m now staying with Monzo is the Shared Tab functionality, my fiance and I use it daily.
I’ve personally experienced a fair few issues of sub-par support, and the slow down and focus on the US/Business accounts has jaded my initial excitement.
I really hope Monzo start focussing on their support structures and tidying up existing features soon, otherwise other bank accounts are looking tempting.
I never thought I’d say that, being a beta user, a shareholder and a frequent forum member 
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For what it’s worth (mostly to avoid scaring anyone that thinks it’s a long drawn out process) FSCS will return the majority of money within 7 days. A small number of cases may take 15 days, but it would be unlikely to be longer.
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I think Monzo had (and maybe still has?) a huge opportunity in the US.
The payments landscape is very fragmented (there is no country-wide Faster Payments service like here in the UK) and you have to use a handful of third-party apps to transfer money which don’t integrate with your main current account (so the workflow is receive $$$ in your Venmo/PayPal/etc then withdraw it to your bank account which takes ~3 days).
A current account that also happens to include instant money transfers (to both Monzo users, as well as ACH and international via Transferwise) would’ve done very well in my opinion.
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There are quite a few US fintechs that already operate current accounts with instant payment transfers, and they’re pretty popular among the tech scene. The whole current account revolution actually arguably began in the US. IIRC In the early days of Mondo, they did say they were inspired by Simple, and wanted to recreate here what they had achieved in the US. They haven’t don’t that yet, which is not too surprising, as simple did issue Monzo with a cease and desist when Monzo tried to copy the wording of Simple’s key feature.
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If Monzo was to put features currently available for free behind a paywall, I’d have a big problem with that. Chuck in the lack of transparency for 1 or 2 years and I’d question what Monzo really stands for anymore.
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People keep saying about transparency, what do you actually mean? What do you want Monzo to tell you I’m order for you to think they are being transparent?
They aren’t the little upstart anymore. Everyone knows who they are. If they posted the Plus plans on here as a “here you go guys, just for you” type thing, it would be everywhere, it’s the same as announcing it formally.
They can’t reveal big forward plans, they can’t tell in advance of redundancies, they can’t explain who or why or when.
Maybe updates from staffers would help but is that really all people want?
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I’m not worried, I was just curious. 
Monzo is my main account, but I still have a legacy account with funds in just in case something happens (monzo system goes down, my account gets frozen, etc etc) personally I find that mix is a good fit for me (and possibly sensible for others?).
It gives me the security of being able to go into a branch if need be, whilst not having to deal with big queues and sales pitches on a regular basis.
I’ve also worked for two major retail banks and became pretty jaded with their treatment of staff, customers etc. So I was drawn to monzo with their transparent approach.
I hope that continues and they succeed in actually challenging the banking sector, but that remains to be seen I guess.
I don’t necessarily want a bank to be transparent, but Monzo started from a place of “hey we are transparent!”, “we share our plans with the community!”. Etc etc. At some point it was cited as a feature on their website.
And I guess the shift away from that was never really acknowledged, until long after the proverbial horse had left the stable.
Obviously as Monzo grow, that start up style level of transparency isn’t sustainable, but for I’d just love more clarity about the general direction of travel they have.
Maybe a very high level road map, maybe that’s more Monzo engagement about their features with the user base, some genuine engagement in the forum about the product.
When I joined Monzo it was around the time The Big List happened, and some of the voting around certain features, and sure some of those approaches aren’t attainable these days perhaps, but I think roadmap type things still are.
I’d say the level right now is basically dropping a blog post into the forum and for the most part abandoning it.
It was just one of those things that elevated them from their competition.
I guess there’s an ever decreasing percentage of their user base that cares about that as they get into the millions, but that’s at least what I would like It to be.
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Not really. They’re halting because their planned cuts would’ve been based on what needed to be done to fix their current issues. With COVID-19 causing further issues, they’ll be almost having to start from scratch again with working out what needs to be cut to still work.
This isn’t “banks delay planned cuts”, this is “banks delay cuts that were planned because now they need to work out what further cuts they need to make”.
The alternative to halting wouldn’t have been “banks make planned cuts”, it would be “banks make previously planned cuts and then follow it later with newly planned cuts”.
That’s the only reason they’ve halted, to get their cuts done in one go when it happens. Because when you get a round of cuts after a round of cuts, it’s a horrible working environment, no-one feels safe, people start jumping ship ‘just in case they’re next’ and everything just spirals worse and worse.
So it’s not brutal cuts they’re avoiding. It’s the spiral. Saying it’s for the good of their employees in the current circumstances is just optics.
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