Hey folks! I’m Mohamed, part of the Monzo engineering team in the US.
The US product copied over the UK’s signup flow and made few changes to it since, but average time to complete signup was around 30 minutes with only 10% of downloads completing signup.
We’ve written a blog post about how we re-imagined our signup flow to make entering basic details much smoother and give low-risk customers a path to open a Monzo account in under 5 minutes:
Looking forward to answering any questions you might have!
Great to hear this, however, it confuses me what personal or device information could change the risk rate of a user. I understand your age or other details, however, would having a name commonly associated with terrorism or crime be a personal factor? Would having an older phone or having a brand new iPhone 15 Pro Max at the age of 18 be a device factor? Or does Alloy do a pre-check to the check Monzo would do?
Hey @boat , thanks for reading our post! Nothing of that sort, we’re not here to judge your phone choice
This is saying that if my personal details have leaked in a known data breach for example, then when a signup comes through with my personal details, we know there’s a chance that a bad actor is submitting my personal details stolen from the internet to sign up for a bank account in my name. So just to ensure it’s me who is signing up, Monzo would ask me for some additional verification to make sure it’s not someone else who is using my stolen details.
Oh - alright. What details do you match and from what database breaches? I imagine very common names such as John Smith will have a bunch of additional verification checks in that case unless it can be bypassed with a different email address that’s not been in an information leak.
Given how many data breaches have happened in the US these past couple of years (I think T-Mobile has managed to let my data leak three separate times already) I’m a bit surprised this narrows things down at all.
I’m Mohamed, part of the Monzo engineering team in the US. 
