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?
I use Chase with all notifications switched off. Still use monzo for app payments to other monzo users.
It seems completely crazy to me anyone would want to be notified when they use their card - and even worse when they use Apple/Google Pay! Might as well receive a system notification every time you unlock the screen. I really don’t get why it’s on by default, never mind not having the option to switch it off.
The only benefit I can think of is to alert me to fraud, but I’ve been paying for things by card for 20 years without ever having an unauthorised payment, while the notification is a daily nuisance.
I love the instant notifications. I think in the early days that was a big part of Monzo’s appeal, back when every other bank didn’t show your card payments for days (or at best hid them in an ‘upcoming payments’ section only on their browser).
You can turn all notifications for Monzo off too though, do it in your Android or iOS settings.
I like being able to see an accurate balance in the app. I don’t like having to clear the notifications telling me I just got on the bus, I just bought coffee everyday before I even get to the office.
And you can’t turn it off on iOS. You have to choose all transaction and payment notifications or none at all. If you use the system settings or the app settings you can only have all or nothing.
If I could customise I would have “you entered your overdraft” and “scheduled payment failed” on and all card payments off. And have monzo-to-monzo payment/bill split requests on.
Why do you want your phone to notify you that you just paid for the bus, when you literally paid for the bus by holding your phone to the card reader? I can’t be the only one who finds this incredibly irritating?
On the other hand, I don’t want my housemate asking me to pay the money they requested in monzo last week because I didn’t get a notification that they’d requested it.
For me, Monzo and Starling are the only apps I allow notifications for, so clearly I find them useful! Mainly for seeing when direct debits go out and stuff. I don’t use my card most days, so I guess the card notifications don’t bother me so much.
One thing Starling does have which I love is the option to turn off notifications for mobile wallet transactions which avoids the duplicate notifications
Thanks for the reply! I didn’t read that blog post when it came out, but I will now; looks interesting. I do have one question for you off the top of my head though - if you have thousands of services then do you have some kind of developer tooling to do jump-to-definition across the RPC boundaries?