Tom Blomfield, CEO of Monzo joins Simon Taylor for a chat about Monzo’s swirling IPO rumours, the growing pains of becoming mainstream and tackling outages from the prepaid era.
Highlights:
- Tom would launch the prepaid card (rather than going straight to current accounts) again, benefits were they:
- Were able to validate their ideas & learn lots more
- Figured out viral mechanics & how to create network effects to drive growth
- Could decide how much of their systems to build in-house vs how much to outsource
- & spot the need for ATM fees
- It’s pointless trying to guess what proportion of Monzo’s potential customer base will like their style i.e. tone of voice
- Sharing technical details on issues only reassures maybe 5% of users but it’s good for the rest of Monzo’s users to see that their ‘techy’ mates are happy with what’s going on
- Joint accounts (shared Pots or maybe a fully combined feed)
are(were) on the roadmap & Monzo’s still in the process of deciding exactly how the feature should work - Open Banking may have trouble..until it doesn’t.
- Despite the reports, it’s impossible to predict when the IPO will be
- Getting acquired (e.g. by a legacy bank) is not the goal but they can’t completely rule it out
- Monzo’s calling users who don’t want to switch from the prepaid accounts to the CA, to understand why / persuade them to switch
- Monzo will launch more lending products (that align well with Pots) “very soon”
- Big tech won’t be able to do what Monzo’s doing because
- They don’t have the trust
- Their specialisms don’t enable them to do what Monzo’s doing
- It’s a big leap to get there from where the big tech companies are