Is this a USP if another bank does the exact same thing? Not unique really then.
Right not the only USP Monzo will have is it charges for cash deposits… no other bank does this 
I think most business bank accounts charge for cash deposits - 
- if they are “free” it usually means somebody else in the customer food chain is subsidising the service you are getting “free”
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Monzo isnt a business bank though. Were strictly talking about current account offerings.
Why compare a fish to an apple
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Which bank does what Monzo does in terms of app functionality (bill splitting, monzo.me, budgets, pots etc etc)? I’m not being provocotive with that question - I’m genuinely interested.
I switched to Monzo as my high street bank (Coop) is decades behind with their app and online banking.
I get what you’re saying. But like any other bank a customer has to weigh up the pros and cons of that bank. I forego my £7.50/month rewards from Coop as the budgeting aspect of Monzo’s app is something I’ve been wanting from a bank for years - I’m sick of entering my spending into a spreadsheet to try budget.
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sorry I was just replying to your -
"Right not the only USP Monzo will have is it charges for cash deposits… no other bank does this "
statement
where quite clearly other banks do charge certain customers for cash deposits other customers are offered “free” cash deposits because said bank can rinse some of their customers in other ways to cover the costs of handling cash
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Starling is basically a like for like with monzo at the minute in terms of functionality only with a slighly poorer customer service through chat some people have said.
Although with the state monzos chat is in at the moment i suppose that could be questioned too.
As a PP said, I’m quite surprised Monzo is offering this at all.
I’d always assumed that Monzo wanted to be effectively a cashless bank, and would never handle cash deposits.
Its my impression that so many people wanted this feature that Monzo are now offering it as a kind of premium extra. Which is reasonable for a bank that is trying to be pretty much entirely digital.
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Would Monzo become the first bank to charge a fee to deposit cash?
This isn’t what comes to my mind when I think of of a modern bank.
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I don’t see an issue with this.
I like that with Monzo I can pay for the features I choose to use and not have to pay exorbitant fees for things to cover features for everyone else.
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I think my point was earlier in the thread, it was stated that the £1 fee is because of costs. My point was the Coop had a lot of cost issues over the last few years and they didn’t introduce charges for deposits which is a very good service for a poor bank.
First I want to get out of the way that I think Monzo is fantastic. Its why I joined the Current Account testing by spending over £100, travelling over 400 miles and spending 11 hours of my life on public transport (collecting my first card from your London office).
Your also exactly right. The priorities such as Monzo offering cheap card use in Europe and other features means savings are needed to be found elsewhere. I accept that. However Monzo is/was aiming to be a bank for a billion people and a bank with a positive social impact - which you do do. However sometimes little things effect demographics in a different way - hence my middle class Londoner comment. I apologise if I insulted anyone with that comment - but £1 can go a long way in different areas of the country.
All I can give is my experiences. I’ve been at pains to avoid stating openly on the forums where exactly I live but I will share a newspaper article about my hometown in The Independent. The strap line itself justifies my reasoning about £1 being a lot for some people in my area and for Monzo to rethink.
I’ve said my soapbox comment, so I will climb off it, and won’t comment any further.
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Thanks for posting this, Kevyn. My sister works in Walsall, which I think appears not far behind Oldham on those lists, and we come from Handsworth in Birmingham which is also a deprived area, so I also feel quite close to this, and in fact it was this concern about the socio-economic implications that caused me to raise this very issue regarding the pricing with the team who’ve been working on this, just this morning.
It’s definitely a valid concern, and that’s why I hope we’ll revisit in the future. But without usage data, and with the knowledge of what this will be costing us, it’s not responsible for us to launch and absorb all the costs. We are doing user research, and we’re looking at all the feedback, but there’s a lot of variables to consider.
One thing I will say is that there’s a very real commitment in this company to inclusion, and being socially responsible. It’s a very high priority to us, and the idea that that a fee for this could fly in the face of that is something we take very seriously.
That said, as Kieran said, it’s imperative to our very existence that we develop and release features that are sustainable. As we don’t have branches, we must work with a third party to allow for these deposits, and that comes with a cost. The simplest way for us to launch this quickly is simply to pass that cost on, and it’s also the most easy-to-understand model to control those costs. This partially was enforced by feedback we’ve had that the international ATM fee model was hard to understand.
From everything I’ve seen - the plan is definitely to revisit this with usage data. The upside of doing this in this way, is that it’s entirely possible for this to work out in a way that would let us absorb some of the costs, whereas it’s very unlikely for a situation to arise where we’d need to raise it since we’re passing on the entire cost already.
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As I mentioned earlier in the thread @simonb, I think launching this with the fee from day one is likely to give you skewed usage statistics. Personally, I would definitely deposit cash in another bank rather than pay for the privilege - I presume I’m not the only one. This means you won’t really know how many people need the cash deposit facility.
Launching with free deposits as a trial, even stating that you intend to introduce a fee further down the line, would likely give you a much better idea of how many people would use the feature.
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That can work both ways, though. Launching with something free that will later be charged can also skew the measure since people may “jump aboard” for the duration of the free period simply because they can do it without penalty meaning that charginging based on planned forward use is then completely misconfigured.
I’m not sure there is a “best” way of doing this (although I take the point about starting with a complete charge such that it’s only likely to go down).
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I think that’s a totally fair point Dan, but if we did that, it creates a narrative that we launch features for free and then charge for them later on, and even though the circumstances were very different, the international ATM fees would get pointed at as another example of this. Typically, most customers have far less context than anyone who posts on this forum.
It is difficult. And we’ve worked incredibly hard to bring down per-customer costs over the last year, so there’s also a general reticence I think to do anything that flies against that. It might well be a different situation if we were profitable, or even if we were significantly profitable per customer whilst still operating at a loss when you include fixed costs.
It’s a difficult balance to strike, and we may well be off-kilter of what we’d ideally like to do here. Like @Feathers said, there may not be a way to do this that works for everyone. But we’ll try our best to figure one out!
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I highly doubt people who don’t need to deposit cash into their accounts would do so anyway just because Monzo don’t charge a fee! What a bizarre thought 
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No fee could lead to small, more frequent deposits, when otherwise the user would save up for a period and make larger, less frequent deposits.
I think that’s an example of the kind of behaviour @Feathers was getting at when suggesting that no fee could equally “skew” usage statistics.
With a fee, there are probably ways that Monzo can identify at least some customers who are cash depositing elsewhere to circumvent fees - have a salary paid in but supplement with a bank transfer, say.
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Again hard to say what would happen…
Personally, at the minute when i get cash over £20 at all ill try and put it into my existing bank ( for free)
If monzo didnt charges £1 id do this with monzo instead.
If monzo did charge £1 i wouldnt use it at all.
Are you trying to say people who would be happy to pay the £1 for a large deposit would then do smaller transactions if it was free? This may be the case id agree as its how id use the service if free
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Yep, that’s what I was trying to say.
A bizarre way to interpret what I wrote certainly. I couldn’t have imagined that interpretation if I’d tried!!
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That’s exactly the kind of scenario that could quickly run up costs, as the cost to us is per deposit.
If you took that to it’s absolute extreme, then with no controls in place people could just make tons of deposits per day, every day, and generate huge costs to us.
And as Nathan says here,
It’s perfectly possible that people would indeed use the service in this way.
Someone depositing £10 a day for 10 days would generate a cost of £10. Whereas even though it’s the same amount of cash, £100 deposited once would only cost us £1.
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