✅ Depositing Cash at the Post Office

anyone looked into/ used these?
https://www.postoffice.co.uk/postal-orders

Your say that like they’re new. Used to be very popular, I sent many off as a child to get stuff from magazines

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I’d never heard of them till I had a google… :sweat_smile:

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Thanks for making me feel old :grin:

The fees are quite high but if it needs a cheque and you haven’t got a chequebook it’s an option

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I think judging from N26 in Germany. Supermarkets could be the only other viable alternative.
https://www.deutscheskonto.org/en/number26-deposit-cash/
sorry the video is German.
As I can’t figure out any other way you could theoretically offer cash deposits via the Post office which is either

  1. “Free”- PR meaning of free
    2)Subsidised

You can’t get away from it completely. I don’t want to pay for your replacement card if you lose it, I don’t want to pay for COps handling your customer service queries, but some of this stuff is unavoidable.

Monzo’s stated aim is to “build the best current account in the world.” Having used PayPoint - or tried to use it, perhaps I should say - I am 100% convinced that PayPoint have no place in the Monzo vision.

I don’t think charges for depositing cash are consistent with their aim, either, but I suppose you could argue that. Too many people, particularly low paid workers, are paid in cash, so i’m of the opinion that banks should let people pay their money in without extra charges.

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I think it is something that will become less and less of a consideration with time. Monzo fits more people with PP paid deposits than it did with no way of depositing. PO with a fee will increase it again slightly further. There might be a next step after that, such as reducing fees, but also just waiting as less and less cash is used will also reduce the amount of people that would have an issue. While waiting much more good can be done on other features.

At 1.5m CA it can be seen that there is some need for depositing cash, but still not an overwhelming need, and to get to 10x it doesn’t seem to be slowing growth either.

It’s not to say it isn’t something to consider, and to work towards being the best possible, just that I don’t think it should be high priority. For someone who deposits a lot of cash Monzo isn’t currently the right account if you are only wanting to have a single bank account, and that is ok.


I got 1.5m from here: https://bankstats.joecarter.xyz/d/000000001/monzo-current-acc?orgId=1&refresh=5m

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What id love from monzo on this is a larger scale research into trends of how we actually deposit cash (as a monzo userbase)

Monzo are all too quick to assume cash is on the way out… back that up and ask your users how often they deposit cash at the minute via there legacy bank and monzo account. How will monzo charging for it affect you. If its as minimal as they think it is then they can swallow it and avoid the massive pr no no that it hs been up until now.

I dont agree with the whole use starling or continue to use your legacy bank arguments for deposits only etc. That shouldnt have to be the case imo. Why settle for an implementation that is glaringly worse than every other bank on the market :grimacing:

To me, because it doesn’t seem to be harming growth in any way, and there are lots of other basic level features that can have time and energy put into them first. Not everything can be achieved at once, and I wouldn’t put the second iteration of this first.

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Why I don’t like the idea of this is because swallowing this cost means less money is available for other things. Whether that means being able to hire less COps, or experiment with other features, any cost swallowed has a side effect somewhere.

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Thats just it though i know personally ive used cash deposits twice in the last 2 years… thats less than £1 in costs for me per year for this feature roughly. Do monzo make that back from me in a year? Yes they do and some.

Is the bad pr worth not swallowing these costs? I dont know but id like monzo to have done some research on this. I know when i mention it to people they laugh and think thats not very “forward thinking” of a modern bank.

And your point about swallowing this means less money for something else… well that can be said about anything monzo do really. Look at the money theyre missing out on atm (0.15%) due to poor planning of the interest bearing pots? That profit could have covered this maybe not. Referral fees… could that £10 per referral but allocated somewhere else. And so on and so forth

While I come to a different conclusion that is a very well reasoned post.

If everyone only used cash deposits once or twice a year, that argument might hold water. But plenty of people make regular cash deposits once or twice a month - or week! That would move the decimal point over by a fair margin into “wildly unsustainable”.

If that means that there are people who will decline to open a Monzo, that’s fair enough. There are some people for whom Monzo wouldn’t be a good fit, and that’s the same with any company or offering.

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Why are you so quick to assume the worst?

Monzo already did exactly that. They sent the survey out before they even introduced cash deposits, it asked about how frequently you deposit cash, where you do it, the amount of cash you deposit etc. I was one of the people that filled it out.

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I didnt recieve any such survey? :thinking:

And this i understand and agree with but in the grand scheme of things im not too sure if the average would be anywhere near that high. Why should people just be told “monzo isnt for you” if they fit into this category. This is a basic usage of a current accout and i like monzo want to “make money work for everyone.

I could swallow it better if monzo came back and were able to give indepth analysis on this instead of saying the functionality for cash deposits is there… what more do you want.

Foreign atm withdrawals limit was a hard pill to swallow for some and me personally as it was one of the wow features but i couldnt fault that they said look a minority is ruining this for x and y reasons and were now going to ask you to alter your habits slightly. I believe they could have saved face here and said look we can give you 4 a year and then its going to cost

I think im personally now taking this thread off topic :joy:

If post office deposits were brought in i wouldnt ever use them due to being able to do the exact same action in the exact same location… only hand over a different card and save myself £2.

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I wouldn’t say it’s as blunt as “Monzo isn’t for you!” I’d say it’s more along the line of “This is what we have to offer, and we think it’s a great offer, but we’ll understand if your priorities are elsewhere.”

On a certain level, this sort of thing happens all the time. With everything. I chose Monzo because their offer is the best fit for me. But I chose Marcus for savings because their offer was the best fit for me. I chose my car because I had certain criteria and one matched best - didn’t mean the others were bad, just they weren’t right for me. Even down to buying a kettle - plenty of good options, but only one that fit what I needed.

So while Monzo want to “make money work for everyone,” they will recognise that there are people out there for whom the current offer won’t work as well as offers elsewhere, and that’s OK.

Finally, the foreign ATM withdrawals situation is exactly what you’re asking for when wanting evidence that a bad situation could develop. There’s precedence for large usage by a small minority bringing unsustainable costs to the business, and that’s why Monzo have gone with a free from the off for the cash deposit feature.

They have left the door open for removing the fee in the future if they feel the balance is right, they’ve said that a few times on the forum. So maybe things will change once they’ve had a long enough period of actual usage to assess.

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Revolut don’t have a banking licence, their advertising is horribly misguided, and their corporate culture appears rotten (example one, the response to the advertising errors; example two, the bloke who bagged on Freetrade on Twitter but neglected to say he worked for Revolut.)

Starling feels more ‘corporate’ and I like the Monzo app experience better. I don’t travel at the moment so that’s pretty irrelevant to me - though even if I did, Monzo would be no worse than Starling for me as I wouldn’t be withdrawing huge sums of cash from ATMs. Paying for paper statements is a bit off-putting. I’m happy to accept that there are people for whom Starling is a better option, though. At the moment it comes down to what areas are more important to the customer making the choice.

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While monzo are aiming to be as inclusive as possible theres also the balance of them being a “digital bank” pushing the boundaries and not being dragged backwards by older methods such as cheque books.

In some respects I can see how it applies here to cash deposits. If you still heavily rely on cash a digital bank may not be for you.

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Heh @ some…