I don’t think its the lack of high street branches. I think its because Monzo lacks the breadth of services many/most people expect from a bank. For example, no mortgages, no credit cards, no ability to pay in cash and cheques at post office. Phone-based customer service not really dependable. A lot of people therefore don’t view Monzo as a ‘proper bank’.
The name probably doesn’t help too. Monzo is a bit of a wacky name for a bank.
Not so much about branches - I am in the 35-to-45 demographic. I am happy to try and use all manner of new things including online banks, but I am still not 100% happy to trust a bank (esp one where my salary goes in) that solely relies on an app on a singla mobile device, with no fully-featured web banking.
I have never lost a phone but I have had one stolen (thankfully ages ago when mobile banking was in its infancy). If this happened now, with Monzo and others fully relying on me being able to access my specific device and SIM card, how easy would it be to regain access to my account?
If they had fully featured online banking I could just go to a friend or internet cafe and cancel/reissue cards, move money, etc.
It’s not related to your sim. As long as you have access to another device and your email, you’d be fine.
You can freeze cards with the web interface, but not much more than that.
Good, i couldn’t remember the Monzo login flow.
My point exactly, it’s easy to gain temporary access to a computer as needed, but how easy/quick is it for the average person to buy a new phone? Most people will have to wait for the insurance money to come through before they can afford it.
You can freeze your account so its secure and then unfreeze when a card arrives in a day or two.
Then you can keep using your account and checking your balance online until your get a replacement phone.
I agree - I’d rather have 2-3 well integrated features than 5-10 half done “innovation” features. It’s coming up to a year now between being told summary and trends are to be merged, and yet here we are without it.
My guess is Monzo has built up a raft of “Technical Debt” that it’s having to spend time cleaning up rather than working on new things, but I might be wrong.
Their pace has fallen straight off a cliff.
I think so too, though I recon that it’s the technical debt that is slowing things down rather than explicit time being spent on fixing it. I’ve got this suspicion that the microservices thing is eating them alive. Now, I could be wrong on that - if any company could get that right then it’s Monzo - but I’ve also seen quite a lot of these systems in the wild and it turns out that shoving the network in the middle of your app is complex. Basically I hope that they have completely abstracted away the distributed nature of things from the app developers, because if they haven’t then it’s going to be an ocean of pain.
In fact, I’d really love to see a blog post on “How Monzo does Microservices and how we avoid it being an ocean of pain“.
This has always been a pain point for me. No tablet app, fully featured online banking. Heck, can’t even check my balance on my work phone if I’m without my personal one without the login dance.
I think general usability like this is more of a barrier than some think to demographics that aren’t Monzo’s focus right now.
Agree with this. The things you’ve listed are simply things that most banks do - but monzo don’t.
I also think that monzos ad strategy probably doesn’t help. Multicoloured cards for referring friends? Errr. Ok. How about ads that show how monzo lets you manage your direct debits, predicts them for you, shows them 2 or 3 days ahead? They’re the kind of features that might make some bank, rather than just spend, with monzo. I could say the same about the left to spend feature, which works best if your salary is paid in directly, and auto resets to match your pay day. Get paid early is another one that might make people switch.
Clearly there’s more that monzo could be doing to encourage people to switch banking completely to monzo.
isn’t this in line with the demographic though? I was always under the impression that Monzo was geared towards a younger audience who are receptive to this sort of marketing, and the cards can act as a status symbol due to the unusual colours.
And Monzo have always said the best way to “full” Monzo is to get them to dip their toe in first. Bright cards entices people like that.
Just looking at the revenue numbers, it’s working and seems Monzo under TS, still excutes on product, but does so make money
Indeed - an audience who don’t generally help turn a profit. Bit of a long game being played keeping them until they make any profit of note per user.
I don’t know about anybody else but I feel like more people would probably use monzo as their bills/main account if you earned cash back on paying bills via Direct Debit like other providers 
Incoming cashback !!!
Yes plz 
Joint Accounts too? Oh. 
That’s definitely one way to draw them in.
Someone mentioned about the cards - at the time Monzo had nice cards when everyone else didn’t, but then a few years ago a few banks came out with nicely designed cards (HSBC for example) and then everyone was at it. No more boring cards with a logo slapped on.
Most cards now are just a plain background with a logo slapped on, HSBC included.
Hey 
I was on the infrastructure team managing our Kubernetes, and now I’m a customer of our Kubernetes in a different team (I write a lot of services)
but I’ve also seen quite a lot of these systems in the wild and it turns out that shoving the network in the middle of your app is complex.
Genuinely we have amazing tooling. People who build microservices will never need to think about any of the networking or Kubernetes side. It’s kind of like Heroku, you don’t think about hosting your app. You just git push and it’s all done for you 
(When I say kind of, I am using this very fuzzily. There are CI checks + reviews + automated rollbacks etc. See Will’s blog post below)
Basically I hope that they have completely abstracted away the distributed nature of things from the app developers, because if they haven’t then it’s going to be an ocean of pain.
Not “completely”. Some developers need access to Kubernete specific things. As an example they may build a service which cannot fail, so they want 10 replicas. They can do this quite easily with a neat lil YAML file.
But yes, the average developer will not need to think about Kubernetes.
In fact, I’d really love to see a blog post on “How Monzo does Microservices and how we avoid it being an ocean of pain“.
Will works on the team which creates the tooling for “avoiding it being an ocean of pain”. His blog post is good
To focus on the app-based bank USP: This might sound absurd to some, but I stopped using monzo as a spending card simply because I cannot turn notifications off for card payments, while keeping them on for app payments.
Because of this they then lost me paying in my salary and all my DDs because they force me to clear 5 or 6 unnecessary notifications per day so I can receive a notification when my partner/housemate requests money/bill split.
(What’s possibly worse, is that I think the android app can customise their notifications in this way.)
Out of interest which bank did you switch to that lets you do this?