I was able to read both of those Times articles from the links.
The ‘useful’ information I got was:
Monzo has a capital position over £175 million.
It is possibly planning to raise £40 million more.
Monzo is looking into the effectiveness of its anti-money laundering processes after an FCA review.
Monzo had 366 complaints to Financial Ombudsman between July and December 2019 - 21% upheld and 140 the 6 months before with a 29% upheld. Many related to customers having issues accessing accounts.
Monzo isn’t great with fraud cases it seems to the journalist.
Some venture capitalist thinks that Monzo’s failure is inevitable while an investor isn’t worried due to cost savings being done.
I really have no historical context for this. Is that good? Bad? Indifferent? That actually sounds not too bad to me in percentage terms for complaints that reached that stage
At a quick glance, the link below doesn’t make good reading for Monzo.
Monzo seem to have a much higher number of complaints per 1000 accounts compared to their major competitors which is concerning as I would imagine it’s customer base should actually be less likely to complain then those of legacy banks.
At terrible thing to do with data like this. It’s not the quick glance that matters, it’s how it compares to everyone else in context.
Granted, I’m no expert - but I plugged in the name of every high street bank I could think of, and they almost all had a much greater percentage of upheld complaints than Monzo did. Then I plugged in the name of every ‘major competitor’ that I could think of, assuming that ‘major competitor’ means ‘fintech bank’, and only Starling were represented (because of the rest not actually being banks, I hazard). And granted, the numbers are lower for Starling, but there’s still a lack of context for why this is the case. Maybe it’s because Starling do a better job of being a bank and dealing with complaints - or maybe Starling have far fewer customers, and maybe of the customers they do have, far fewer use them as their main bank.
There’s not enough information to draw conclusions just from one set of data.
