Hi James, good question. We’ll perhaps publish a blog post setting out timelines in more detail, but the answer is broadly “the first half of 2017”.
We’re testing out the very first Monzo bank accounts internally right now; we’ve successfully made live Faster Payments, Bacs Direct Credits and Direct Debits, and foreign transfers, all with Monzo account numbers and sort-code. We’re also working to finalise our full MasterCard implementation.
We can’t hold more than £50k of customer deposits until our restrictions are lifted by the regulator, so we’ll have to stick with internal testing until that happens. Once our restrictions are lifted, we’ll start rolling out the first few hundred “full” banks accounts to early supporters. I’d hope this would be around March/April/May time. We need to figure out the fairest way of allocating these first accounts!
As long as we’re happy that everything’s working as expected, we’ll ramp up the numbers of these accounts, as we did with the prepaid card. We’re aiming to fully transition the prepaid programme to full bank accounts by about June/July 2017.
As with before, these dates are just my best guess. There are a number of reasons the dates could slip, but they’re what we’re working to right now.
Hope that helps!