Fixing financial planning and analysis

[Peter_G]

There’s a really interesting topic on the two options here:

Payments from Pots by Virtual Cards - how should they work?

A few of us (including @avb) have been talking about how paying directly from pots when you use a virtual card might work. It seems there are two options: It works like the Bills Pot. Money comes out of the main account, and then a transfer is made immediately from the specified pot to cover the transaction. If you don’t have enough money in the pot, it’d be covered from the main account. It comes directly out of the Pot. This would need a new feed for pots, and lots of behind the scenes a…

I was pushing for the “pay-back” option because I thought that it would be easier and quicker. Lots of interesting feedback from Monzo peeps on why it’s not, though:

Payments from Pots by Virtual Cards - how should they work?

I’ve been chatting with Adam about this this morning, it’s not quite so clear-cut: Making them work like Bills Pots is tricky, because get less time to process a Mastercard payment than we do for a Direct Debit. Taking money directly from the Pot is tricky, because we’d need to add a feed for pots, and a bunch of other things… tl;dr Nothing is easy, everything is trade-offs

Payments from Pots by Virtual Cards - how should they work?

We actually had this same conversation this morning and it took me a second to remember why this doesn’t work If you do this then you can’t use any money “set aside” for the payment (as I think you’re hinting at). You’d want to consider the main account balance plus the pot balance, which is tricky (though of course not impossible) for us to do right now.

[Peter_G]

So let’s pick this up again

Introduce More Pot Types… pt 2

If we agree that pots are essential to budgeting properly, we need to pay them a little more love. So this is more than pot types, it’s what you can do with pots - and how to do it with them.

Let’s start with some basics

1. As others have pointed out, 20 pots is not enough. It’s artificial limit - I’d suggest removing it and seeing what folk do. Then optimise for, say, the median number. (I’d argue that, if the changes suggested in this post come to be then no great changes are needed to the interface).

2. We do, though, need better ways to transfer money between pots. This is really a separate topic, but I’d suggest that the improvements we’ve seen to transfer money between personal, joint and business accounts be extended to pots. And that the behaviour to transfer money to pots is aligned to external account sending.

3. We’ve seen that pots are (hopefully) getting a feed. This is a positive start that allows them to evolve to be the source of money transfers and to hook card transactions to. Hopefully we’ll see this soon!

4. One simple tweak, from the transactions screen, would be to allow users to push or pull money from pots. Money into the account? Tap to move it to a pot / external account. Money out of the account? Tap to pull that value from a pot / external account.

The more interesting stuff:

5. Be able to flag pots as offset pots. This would mean that the value in them would be included for overdraft (and speculatively credit card) purposes. So if you held a total of £1000 in offset pots, you wouldn’t be charged an overdraft until, and could be overdrawn up to, -£1000. The current set up is controversial, but I think is helpful for some scenarios. It’d offer better possibilities - and help stimulate Plus/Premium subscriptions - if this were available for paid customers.

6. Make pots available for non-Monzo accounts. This might sound a bit odd, but bear with me: imagine you have £2000 in a Nationwide account. In the Monzo app, you could squirrels these into pots, so you know what the money is to be used for. It won’t affect the money in the account, or even ring-fence it, but visually it would be handy to see what you’ve earmarked it for.

7. Dates for goals in Pots. And more intelligence - so if you know that you want to achieve £100 by next month, the app could suggest saving £x/day or £y/week - and set up the transfers with one tap should you approve them.

8. Integrate Pots goals with bills, upcoming payments and open banking. So if I know that my credit card bill is £200, and that can be pulled from open banking, set that as the goal amount. Similarly, if the (currently dumb) credit score thing says I have £1345 outstanding in loans, offer me a plan to squirrel that way in Pots - and hook it to the right direct debits so it gets taken automatically.

Anything else I’ve missed on pots? I feel like there’s a lot more that could happen with them.

What might this look like? Just a few basic ones for today…

On the transactions screen:

On the Pots screen:

I promise that soon we’ll get to some of the analytics and backward looking stuff…

[Alexxxxx (>50 categories pls)]

Just replying to this to say I really do think we need to be able to collapse tomorrow/upcoming transactions, whatever other changes may or may not happen.

I now have this scenario at the end of every month which means opening the app shows me nearly 0 useful information. Especially as most of these are internal pot transfers I’ve set up…

1. I know!
2. The money isn’t even going out of my account and the transactions are entirely irreversible.

I simply don’t need this front and centre over actually seeing my latest transactions.

[Revels]

@Peter_G

• We do, though, need better ways to transfer money between pots. This is really a separate topic, but I’d suggest that the improvements we’ve seen to transfer money between personal, joint and business accounts be extended to pots. And that the behaviour to transfer money to pots is aligned to external account sending.

This is one of my biggest gripes. I keep posts hidden for aesthetics and because I don’t need to see them daily but adding to them (with the exception of salary sort) is a pain.

Being able to split any incoming payment to pots would be ideal. I got a refund for something the other day. I had to unhide two pots, split the spare change part into my coin jar and the rest into another. Then rehide them.

@Peter_G

So if you held a total of £1000 in offset pots, you wouldn’t be charged an overdraft until, and could be overdrawn up to, -£1000.

What I find so bizarre about this is that money in pots counts towards interest (if with Plus/Premium)

If I had an overdraft and I was trying to pay it off/stay out of it but couldn’t commit to that 100%, I think it would be good to have an overdraft pot.

Account = -£996.52
Overdraft pot - £1000

Currently to Monzo that would make me £996.52 overdrawn in reality I have £3.48

But they think it’s better that my account says

Account = £3.48

Pots are trying to be “out of sight, out of mind” but then half arse it for the very people it needs to help.

[Alexxxxx (>50 categories pls)]

Agree with all of this.

Been living with Monzo’s overdraft ‘reasoning’ for so long, I hadn’t even thought of how ridiculously inconsistent the overdraft vs interest situation is for plus.

[davidwalton (Award Winning Hot Coral Analyst)]

Looks like you’ve already voted for it

Add the ability to minimise/hide X days from now items from transaction feed

One thing I love about Monzo is how they show you your Direct Debits and BACS payments 3-4 days in advance, it allows you to check for anything unexpected and amend your Bills Pot to match. However… When you get shown 10+ Direct Debits 4 days in advance and have to scroll past them in your feed every time you use your app for the next 4 days is a major irritant, it would be ok for 1 or 2 but when it pushes ‘Today’ miles below the fold it’s a pain in the backside. It’d be nice if there could b…

[Alexxxxx (>50 categories pls)]

Haha I couldn’t find that at all before I posted here but was sure I’d seen a whole thread on it!

[Peter_G]

Where were we? Yes, we’re at

Powerful search and filters on the transaction feed.

Way back in time, before there was Summary, Monzo had the Spending tab. This gave some nice run downs of amounts spent by category and merchant (I think - my memory is hazy and my google-fu is failing me).

Separately, the iPhone app has some excellent search functionality (which is sorely lacking on the Android version, but I digress) which lets you search by merchant, location and loads (and loads) of other stuff. It’s one of the rare occasions where someone has really thought about the problem and really delivered on it. It’s excellent (even if, reportedly, it kinda didn’t work for a while).

So, what do these things tell us? I think they tell us that (looking at the budgeting poll) that users really want this form of insight. But instead of giving it to us over time, it’s actually been taken away by Monzo - or only available to a subset of users. This needs to be fixed!

How to do this?

This one is quite simple, I think…

1. Bring search parity to Android

Then…

2. Add in the ability to only see credits or debits
3. Let users save searches - let’s call them filters.
4. Let users sort group transactions (for example by merchant or by category)
5. Let users sort transactions by things other than date. By merchant name, category name, or value would be a good start.

I was originally attracted by this (from this post):

But I can’t see how it works with the current app set up. I’m attracted by a simple tab, but then you’d need a date range and you might as well do it from a proper filter. And, in any event it’d end up looking like my Dozens mock.

[Anarchist (Press ‘Help’ search ‘Contact us’ or email help@monzo.com or call 0800 802 1281)]

If you have this

@Peter_G

Bring search parity to Android

You get this anyway.

@Peter_G

Add in the ability to only see credits or debits

[Peter_G]

Ooh, exciting. I looked for that the other day (brief iPhone dalliance) and it wasn’t immediately evident.

But my love for the iOS search grows.

No joke, it might be the swing decision between Android or iOS next. (Then watch them discontinue it).

[BritishLibrary]

First off… How did I miss the post about pots from 6 days ago. Outraged!

Out of that big list of Pot Things - I would really love to see , and please. Especially the ability to auto-move money based on external account interactions.

On the topic of your pots getting cluttered… I’d love to see Nested Pots. Or maybe keeping a Pot analogy, having a “Shelf” to put similar pots on. I can have my Savings Shelf, my Bills Shelf, My “I want to keep these things hidden shelf because I keep looking at the “latest tech” thread” Shelf… etc.

All of those pots neat and tidily packed away inside my Monzo Cupboard. Better than just having all my pots spread out on my kitchen floor or something.

[Peter_G]

@BritishLibrary

I’d love to see Nested Pots . Or maybe keeping a Pot analogy, having a “Shelf” to put similar pots on. I can have my Savings Shelf, my Bills Shelf

I love this idea. I was thinking that the headings on the accounts screen should be collapsible (so see/hide all pots, all connected credit cards, all connected current accounts etc). But this is a much better option - if the UX folk can find an elegant way to aggregate and disaggregate pots.

[Peter_G]

@BritishLibrary

the ability to auto-move money based on external account interactions.

PS if no one delivers a rules based money automation system within the next year then a) everyone is a fool and b) it would force me to do something about it.

[Revels]

I’d never even considered nested pots but now you’ve mentioned it, I think I want it.

[BritishLibrary]

I was just about to badly mock up a picture of a nice shelf I found with some pot icons but I couldn’t find any pot icons as a png so instead of my poor effort in photoshop, you get this text version of my poor effort instead.,

[BritishLibrary]

@Peter_G

it would force me to do something about it.

I’m totally here for the new challenger bank, Peter_Gzo.

[Peter_G]

@BritishLibrary

I’m totally here for the new challenger bank, Peter_Gzo.

I’m thinking more like Flow. I think they’re planning on coming to the UK so no one need to troubled by my imminent entry to the industry.

(Although if they don’t measure up, I’m so here for it).

[MalaiseForever (Ethan)]

Peter, please can you break into Monzo’s systems and just start building all this stuff? Thanks

[Peter_G]

Perhaps more seriously, Monzo has lost its mojo. We know that that sometimes happens when companies grow up.

So what we need is for a few startup companies to be created with the aim they’ll be folded into Monzo.

Get Tom to run a few. Similar shareholders so they grow and get folded into / replace the main product. Continual pipeline of innovation. Job done. Who do I call?

[Revels]

@Peter_G

Who do I call?

Dan Aykroyd.