How would you attract new customers with an account fee? That’s an instant no for many people.
There’s plenty of new things coming out next year but you still need to attract customers in the first place to make them aware of them.
Organic growth has worked well so far but that can only last so long
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With good features and the reasons we love Monzo? I’m just not sure how cash bribes will ever work out - for every long term customer you’ll end up with 10 freeloaders that just grab the cash and run.
Organic growth has worked well so far but that can only last so long
I’d rather have them work hard to retain & monetize their current customer base than screwing everything up while chasing an impossible dream.
Again, I’ve seen multiple instances of companies completely ruining their core product in the name of “growth”, and they end up with not only no significant growth but a lot of their existing customers ended up leaving or felt alienated.
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I agree with this.
I would not pay for an account with Monzo unless they rolled out some serious additional features and had a roadmap with additional features coming regularly that noone else could offer.
In the middle of next year all of the Fintech companies will be about level featurwise and the legacy banks could we’ll be catching up. Introducing a £1 fee would not work. I’d sooner Monzo got more fees by increasing their marketplace. ISA’s, more savings, loan extensions, P2P lending, tie ups with Bulb, Igloo, Octopus - I’ll pay them indirectly for all of these. Become a hub.
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I’ve said before I’m not a fan of paid incentives but Monzo said they’ll do a blog to explain how much impact they’ve had. Maybe wait for that before denouncing it totally?
The alternative is proper advertising, which they’ve also been trialling (now on Spotify as well) but that costs a lot more.
It’s a bit disingenuous to suggest that all the efforts are on growth at the moment rather than on keeping existing customers. They’re still launching and improving features
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Would be interesting to see the metrics on the referrals when they come out.
I do agree it comes across as spammy - for all the same reasons others mention - some of the notification types should be reserved for important stuff.
Location of the referral button seems out of place in the payments tab. Especially as top priority first line on the list jobby. Wouldn’t mind if I could hide it, but I can’t - but putting this above the key functions of the payments tab seems flawed.
And then the value of the referral itself. I’ve recommend monzo to a few people when there was no referral bonus, and largely most people I know now are on Monzo, but I don’t think I’d bother referring them for what equates to 2 pints or so, on the balance of me spamming my friends.
I get they’re trying to grow - but it seems like a cheap shot way to engage with potential new customers.
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I feel like this is moving from a discussion about how Monzo are marketing the £10 to whether Monzo should be marketing the £10 - two different things.
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Nothing wrong with seeming desperate (unless you’re on a date 
). It often results in achieving what you desire.
They are desperate to get to 10million users ASAP and are trying everything out to see what works.
If they do things the same way they will likely get the same results… 10m users by what, 2027? Or they could try to turbocharge it 
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Suspect it’s cheaper then advertising on all the stations owned by Global for a few weeks, and probably gets better pick up.
Public transport advertising is dirt cheap as well, pick the right channels and use them
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I’ve seen a handful of comments along these lines and I honestly find them quite illogical.
Just to recap, the £20 million of crowdfunding was part of a larger round that also included £85 million of venture capital. We also didn’t start at £0 obviously - we have to have a minimum amount of capital reserved at all times to satisfy regulation plus more than that to not be irresponsible should anything go wrong.
We have a huge amount of different costs, so attempting to quantify what exact part of money was used on what makes zero sense. The only logical way to look at it is that the crowdfunding amount is proportionally representative of every or most costs in the company as laid out in the prospectus.
It’s not a case of “Great! Another £20 million. We will spend all of it on this one particular thing that we otherwise would not have done.”
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The ‘£20 million’ usage was detailed as much as it could be in the prospectus prior to the opening of the £20M crowdfunding (apologies if I’ve posted information that shouldn’t be in the public domain - if I have - nuke it!);
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I’m sure if Monzo keep stuff like this up it will be an effective way of getting new customers.
I’m also sure it will make me change bank.
They’re probably still right to do it though.
I’m very protective of my notifications, I HATE getting notifications for stuff I don’t care about on my wrist via smart watch. Normally you have to be a real person. Monzo is one of the few exceptions.
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Yup - which covers most things that happen here! Point being that even if you invested the maximum amount you can’t say that it falls into any of those categories individually, so the only logical thing to assume is that it falls proportionally into all of them.
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I don’t find Monzo’s marketing excessive at all! Being part of 3 crowdfunding rounds, I am happy to see Monzo proactively marketing, and it’s great to see the different techniques used.
With regards to the quantity of notifications, social media posts and emails, I have probably received 6-7 combined. That’s not excessive, considering this incentive started some weeks ago. A simple swipe or tap of the unsubscribe link doesn’t take long! 
I’ve also seen some people mention that there is no incentive for them. At the very start Monzo was not offering any incentives at all (except a short £5 each test campaign in August this year) and they grew to 1,000,000 users, so it may not be to everyone’s liking, but I promise you it’ll work!
Keep at it :mondo: 
P.S. @simonb will the results of this marketing campaign be made public? It will be interesting to see the growth. 
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I’m very protective of my notifications, I HATE getting notifications for stuff I don’t care about on my wrist via smart watch. Normally you have to be a real person. Monzo is one of the few exceptions.
Same here with emails. I make sure every single one is something I care about and never sign up for marketing spam.
But the worst is when someone sends you a push and an email… I mean the push by itself was too much but I could just ignore it and move on… but sending an email in addition was really off limits.
Do one or the other, but not both unless you are sure the push wasn’t delivered.
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I don’t find Monzo’s marketing excessive at all!
I never said Monzo’s marketing was excessive - I am fine with their external marketing.
But wasting my time by trying to force me to do their marketing is a bit too much (especially considering I am already pretty much a walking advertisement for Monzo - I always bring it up when someone complains about their legacy bank).
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Monzo does its marketing on the basis of legitimate interest, at least according to the privacy policy. I think consent would be a firmer basis
Honestly I’d happily pay you 10£ just to stop this desperate nagging.
It was the above which lead me to believe you thought it was excessive 
I understand though, you want a clear way to say no.
I just don’t like being interrupted and my time wasted. It’s one of the reasons why I’m with Monzo to begin with - they never waste my time with bullshit papers in the mail or “security”.
Same goes with every other provider - I happily prefer dealing with more expensive companies just because they get out of my way and just work.
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So it’s proportionally wasteful, potentially, by this logic
If you believe that this one particular time-sensitive growth idea is both “wasteful” and also completely representative of all our marketing efforts, then… I guess? But really neither of those things are true.
But with that said if you did agree with that and you were an investor, you’d also have to believe that it would have a negative impact on growth and therefore future valuation to be in any kind of way concerned about the basis of your investment decision.
And I really don’t think anyone believes that.
Like everything else, we’ll assess the data when the experiment is done and see what impact it had.
But even if it were the case that a particular marketing effect had absolutely zero impact, I wouldn’t call it a waste, we’d have just found out that something didn’t work, which is also valuable.
If we continued to throw money at something that was having zero impact despite having collected meaningful data on it, then it could be a waste. But that isn’t what’s happening here.
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