How should Monzo get paid for marketplace products?

[alexs (Alex Sherwood)]

@duncang

The conflict is the same that Google and Facebook have in the advertising space - the user is the product. In their case the person paying the bills is the advertiser, and so the advertiser is the customer and the user’s privacy pays the price.

Could you please expand on this?

In Monzo’s case, they have specifically said that they will protect user’s privacy -

@tom

We will never transfer your data to a third party without your permission, so you should never receive emails or calls you didn’t expect. We are always thinking about ways we could be inadvertently making you trackable, and how to avoid that as well.

As we’ve seen with the testing of the energy partnerships & as Tom’s mentioned, Monzo users may effectively pay for the services too, by sacrificing some of the savings that they could have gained, if they had signed up with the supplier directly. But as far as I can tell, that will be the cost to the user (in return for convenience), rather than privacy.

Monzo is offering suppliers a way to access users without paying for marketing & in return, they’re taking a portion of the incentive that the supplier would have paid the user to get them to switch & / or some of the money that they would have spend on marketing, in order to earn revenue. Once Monzo’s has enough users, that could mean that the supplier actually saves money compared to traditional marketing methods, while the user benefits from the insights, along with frictionless access to & management of, the service.

@duncang

I worry about an analogous thing happening here, where Monzo’s users are the product and Monzo’s suppliers are the real customers.

The reality is that if Monzo doesn’t enable access to useful suppliers & give useful recommendations, they won’t earn revenue. So there’s a clear incentive for them to make this service work for users, as opposed to users simply being taken advantage of. Call me naive but it seems like a win / win to me - I don’t have a problem with the suppliers benefiting too.

@duncang

Ideally Monzo would get users to pay for the service; that way the users’ interests will always genuinely come first.

I’m strongly opposed to that idea because it immediately creates a barrier for those who can’t afford to pay for the service. Presumably if Monzo want to achieve their goal of offering the current accounts to the unbanked, that’s not an option. It sounds like you may have accepted that already though..

@duncang

rather than trying to fund themselves by parasitising parts of their partners’ businesses

What do you mean?