Financial vulnerability and Monzo

Completely agree.

I think the front end of this aspect could use some work, in order to unify it to a single place within the app, so you’re not having to search and hoping to find the right thing.

I just edited my previous post to link here:

This lists all the various questions you can search in the help section that will lead you to the tell us more flow. This might be a good place to start for a checkbox style approach.

I think it would be great to get some input from someone at Monzo who works on this team to share their thoughts. Or perhaps someone with an understanding of some such needs. @Demmedelusive springs to mind given that he works within mental health.

Has any other member of the community who has been through the process, or wanted to, but was put off able to comment their thoughts, and maybe share what they feel may make it more accessible for them?

Would be nice to widen the scope of discussion and bring in some more views on this.

Personally speaking though, I like the idea behind a checkbox approach because I’d be more comfortable clicking a button, than I would trying to explain. Because sometimes it can feel like you’re trying to justify yourself, which leads me into the train of thought of oh you don’t need help you’re just being melodramatic. It’s a complicated thing, and much harder to discuss when it’s associated with your actual identity and not just a pseudonym.

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This works both ways - when I was off on long term sick several years ago (due to mental health) and struggling with money I absolutely hated filling out questionnaires about my situation with anybody, whether financial institutions or otherwise. The thoughts of answering lots of questions still sends my anxiety into overdrive.

All I wanted was to be able to copy and paste from a document I’d written with a mental health professional that clearly articulated what I was going through and the impact it was having on me. I ended up resorting to writing letters to my various creditors and they all just continued to send standard template responses.

It was a horrific situation and it’s one of the reasons I’m still paying the debts off four years later. Nobody actually listened or paid attention to what I was saying and they still don’t now. I’m currently struggling with a high street bank and my mortgage because I had a payment holiday from them and their debt management team are now chasing me for the arrears, even though the bank agreed the payment holiday :man_facepalming:t2:

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Sorry to hear that @Dan5 and thanks for sharing your experience.

I understand what you mean here completely, and really I think this is why you want to (ideally) have both options open to people at any one time so they can do what would work best for them.

For anybody struggling to articulate their problems, checkboxes or formulaic diagnostic questions could help; equally if you have already taken the time to articulate your situation in a thought-out letter it’s understandable that you would want a way to simply send this in to a number of organisations and not be forced to “jump through hoops” (especially at a time when you might not have the energy or motivation to do this, long-winded forms get on everybody’s nerves so I can imagine how it would only be even worse if you were already finding it daunting).

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Absolutely - I think the important thing is making it as easy as possible in as many different ways to make it easy to people to make any organisation aware of any vulnerabilities they might have.

As a society we’re getting better at accepting and supporting those who need it, but we’re still a long way off getting it right, all of the time.

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