Because we don’t have branches, we’ve been working to find another way to let you pay cash and cheques into your Monzo account. We’re working to start testing this out by the end of the month. And we’ll share some more details about how it’ll work very soon!
Is there room for cheques, notes and coins in your life or are you looking forward to a cashless future?
Check here for progress updates as they happen! Follow along on Twitter or in the app, in your Help screen
Update: we’ve had a lot of discussion on the thread, and one of our payments engineers, Nick, jumped in to give a detailed answer to many of your questions. You can read what he had to say here!
Monzo aren’t the only fintech to charge for this service. Out of the ones that do £1 is one of the cheapest.
The push is to leave cash behind entirely if possible.
Depending on whos providing the service in the background the £1 fee to me is reasonable for convenience, especially considering I’ll save up any cash I have to make two or three large deposits a year.
Why think of them as fintech? I think of them and compare them to my bank as thats what theyre trying to make me move over from.
Think about it theyre trying to move away from the millenial only customer image and this will be a horrible sticking block for many… try telling my mum she has to pay a fee to put her money into the bank and shell think im telling her an unfunny joke.
Because that’s what they are they’re a financial institute like any other… Except for the fact that they’re (monzo specifically) pushing the boundaries of current financial technology.
Not everybody will share this view but cash is legacy. Anecdotally, more and more places & people are moving away from it, it’s getting to be an outdated medium.
I know that cash isn’t gone yet… It’s still relied on for plenty of things but from personal experience I use it for fewer and fewer things, for example: Hair cuts & the chip shop. That concludes my list
Whenever I receive cash, i.e. on my Birthday & at Christmas, it’s always deposited straight into a legacy bank (at my earliest convenience). However it’s not always convenient! I have to find parking which is a pain as my branch is on a really busy high street with limited space for cars. Plus the opening times limit me to work lunch time & a couple of hours on a Saturday.
If we look at PayPoint for a moment (not confirmed but an almost definite partner for this cash deposit functionality)… They have far more locations, much longer opening hours and likely less queues because of the sheer quantity of points to choose from
Would I trade convenience for up to £5 a year depositing what little cash I deal with? Yes!
Would everybody? Almost certainly not! But I’m sure that plenty of people will complete accept the minimal fee for this especially when you weigh up how much money monzo aims to save every single customer by offering world class budgeting tools, an ever expanding feature set and the excellent marketplace which monzo are always trying to grow
Cash has a cost and I don’t think this has anything to do with the so called “millennial customer image” I know a 70 year old with a monzo account because their legacy bank was so awful. All of their “security” causes so many headaches…
(That turned into long ramble… I seem to be doing that a lot lately )
So, until we can actually roll this feature out, everything is subject to change. And, as per usual, the best thing to do is wait until we do that and we’ll of course have an absolutely comprehensive blog post answering all the questions you could possibly have at that time and providing all the info on how this is going to work.
That said, to mitigate any potential speculation in between now and then, I’ll give you a broad perspective of where we’re at.
The primary reason for charging a fee is simply that offering this feature to customers is going to cost money. It’s really that simple. We’ve worked incredibly hard over the last year to bring down our per-customer costs. It’s something that, in the talks leading up to our recent investment round, was noted by all investors. That’s a path we’re going to continue on as we head towards a healthy, sustainable business, which is obviously where we want to be!
The other thing we’re thinking about, is that before we launch the product we don’t know how much it’s going to be used! If we launched it at no cost to the customer, and then within a month a million people are using it all the time, that’s a huge cost. Obviously we don’t expect that to happen, but the usage will be somewhere between 0% and 100% of customers and we don’t exactly know where on the scale that will be! So it’s better to be cautious and figure it out
This is one of the reasons I love Monzo, feedback is taken on board. If in a few months the service doesn’t have high usage I trust that Monzo would revist the fee to make it even better for consumers.
At the same time Monzo isn’t a charity and needs to make money. Charging the raw cost for it’s use is more than fair IMO, especially considering Monzo are:
As @nexusmaniac points out if the partner were to be Paypoint then it’s cheaper for me to pay the £1 fee than drive a further 6 miles to my nearest branch and potentially pay for car parking than to literally cross the road from my front door.
Does your bank not offer post office deposits? Mine does and its free to do.
The point i was trying to make was that yes I understand this will be a cost to Monzo and Monzo wants to become profitable but why cant they swallow up the minimal costs this will be if in fact customers will use this as little as you all think but yet open themselve up to a whole new rake of potential customers.
Obviously they are a fintech, the point i want to make on that was their “goal” was to make you use use money as your main current account and “make money work for everyone”. 9/10 people in the street would laugh if you said your bank will charge you to put money into your own account, would you not agree with this point?
In terms of the other fees monzo have applied ive agreed with because these werent things other banks provided and were a real bonus to us users over legacy banks… this is a real backwards step in my eyes charging for cash deposits.
I do still have my Lloyds card somewhere but you have to order a paying in book or something? But… you can only order it by going to a branch in the first place? Then you have to fill it out each time and remember to take it with you.
Also my local post office is closed outside of my work hours, same goes for my local branch unless I go on a Saturday but I’d rather do other things than visit the bank.
I agree a lot of people would, but ultimately it depends how often people deposit cash, there’s very few people I know besides my parents that do it on a regular basis, I know they all find it a faff.
I for one would prefer a £1 fee to add cash than a £10 fee for a direct debit bouncing.
I’m interested to find out if there are any other limitations to the OP. Such as how much you can deposit at any one time (hopefully not to keep it simple).
I only really need to deposit cash once or twice a year. Even then it’s less than a hundred so I’d normally just spend it. A small fee wouldn’t really bother me.
If it’s through a third party that is more accessible than a bank branch - even better.
Is it normally that quick for cash deposits to go into your account?
Ahh ok you don’t need a paying in book anymore do you? When I last enquired about it I was told you had to go into branch for one to be ordered to your home address, hense why I never bothered.
I guess it still doesn’t solve the issue of my local post office being closed outside my work hours. I could make a dash during my lunch break at work, but the queues are always huge at that time.
they’re a financial institute like any other… Except for the fact that they’re (monzo specifically) pushing the boundaries of current financial technology. 
I know a 70 year old with a monzo account because their legacy bank was so awful. All of their “security” causes so many headaches… 
and we don’t exactly know where on the scale that will be! So it’s better to be cautious and figure it out 
