Improving Monzo Plus - If you were Monzo

Great idea - really hard to pick, but:

Big stuff

A proper, in earnest, overhaul of how all “budget adjacent” features work in Monzo.

There’s clearly differing views on what “budgeting” is and means to each user, per the other thread; wether that’s assigning a category to track, or paying all your bills from a Bills Pot. It’s all “budgeting” of some form.

The biggest and best thing I could want from Monzo, would be a totally comprehensive budgeting approach

Rethink budgeting, and all budget adjacent features, so they play nicely together.

That’s my one biggie.

Little Stuff

Optimise how Virtual Cards work

  • lots of threads have touched this already; but a truly single use card, lockable VCards, Pay from Pot, Freezable VCards, and maybe other ‘dynamic use’ style featurs. This would be my biggest wish from Plus, and will likely keep it if they improve VCards.

  • I think this is becoming my favourite feature at the mo, so making this “best in class” would be my priority.

UI Stuff

  • There’s just bits about the UI that don’t play nice - the infinite scroll list of categories icons, the weird Plus tab that does nothing. Etc etc. All that could Be Nicer.

I’m obvs keen to see what comes next with Premium though, and if that brings any new non-insurance/product led features.

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YNAB tie in, wether that be by Monzo calling their API or persuading them to use yours (via Plaid who they use for US linked accounts)

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Transactions from pots, link a virtual card to a pot

I’d love to be able to attach PayPal credit and klarna along with my credit cards and bank accounts

I’d love to see some integration with loyalty cards for retailers and if it’s possible, have them automatically scanned alongside my Monzo card :+1:

I really like this thread, I think it might be a little ambitious to what our one squad can achieve in this ever shortening quarter, but I think it’s great to think about how you would fit work in if you were us

Small stuff
Use a Pot as money source for Virtual Cards instead of main account

We really want to do this, but I have to contest the calling of it a small job. On the surface it may seem so, but there is a huge amount of legal and compliance questions to solve in relation to various payment account regulations and what that would mean for the product, as well as mastercard lifecycle problems to solve (mainly if we allow you to swap the virtual card between various money sources), what happens if you go overdrawn on a pot, and we need to support transaction feeds on pots.

All of these things can be solved, but it will take us a fair amount of time, and is the reason we didn’t make this an option for launch (but didn’t rule it out, and paved the way for it by leaving the money source item in the creation flow).

Edit: I forgot to mention dealing with the fact that virtual cards on pots might work the opposite to how bills pots work, which would be confusing

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I’d love you to expand on this, what would you do to the infinite scroll list to make it nicer? What do you expect from the Plus tab?

There’s another really great thread by @Peter_G (although no polls in that one…) that covers some design related context better than I can probably articulate (here)

But as a quick off top of head list:

  • Creating a category - the top two rows of the page account have quite a wide selection set behind them - not sure how many icons there are, but to find the “right one” can take some time - it could be made better by utilising the blank space in the Category Creation area. (Similar to the “emoji keyboard” built in to OSs these days)

  • There’s built in tedium into the top icon picker, when there’s a shed load of screen real estate that could make that process smoother:

  • The Plus Page - Doesn’t really serve much purpose once you’ve learnt what all the features do. For the most part, most of the pages in this tab either lead to a Help page screen, or are settings accessed elsewhere in app - so from a heirarchy point of view, it just seems to ‘not fit’. It’s not bad in and of its self, but I just don’t see the purpose it serves once you are signed up and have turned on the relevant features - it’s effectively a settings page that’s given a very high status in the UI.
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I see that @BritishLibrary is replying, but it might be useful to take a quick look over here:

Monzo Plus: Thoughts on Design

Edit: beaten to it!

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Just jumping in to hugely echo this point.

It can take such a long time to find the right icon, and this would be greatly improved by showing a grid of icons for us to choose from. This is perhaps the single most confusing UX decision in the app in my opinion.

Also, on this screen, more colours please. Only 8 (right?) colours for dozens of potential custom categories just doesn’t line up. The colour of the category is a huge visual indicator and so it really seems a missed opportunity here.

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Super interesting, I hadn’t considered the latter half of this in how it would work - but it does make sense.

I honestly believe that if Virtual Cards got a bit of a power up, it would be the feature I want the most / would most want to keep from Plus. As it stands now, I can live with or without it.

In terms of implications of design, I guess you have:

  • Pay from Pot - and work like a Bills Pot - there would be no sense in this as the desire (as I can tell) would be to completely ring fence money from your main account, if it takes it out of your main balance first, then out of the pot, that’s no providing the ring-fencing I believe is the desired effect. This then leads to the problem of “Pot Transaction History”.

  • Pay from Pot - and is seen as an entirely separate funding source - likely the most desirable - but comes with the most work.

  • Overdrawn pots & Pay from VCard - I suppose the ideal is that a Pot couldn’t go overdrawn / the transaction rejected (otherwise you’re back to the ‘what’s the value in a pot and a vcard’ thing again).

  • Freezing a card - Does that cause problems? - not sure the Mastercard rules around it, but that ‘feels’ like a nice win without complicating too much, relatively speaking…

  • Instant disposal / one time use? Again another feature highly sought after in the Vcards - aside from a theoretical limit of cards, and the workflow to automate the stoppage and generation of a new card, is there any other ‘behind the scenes’ reason this is harder than we may think?

Both excellent posts.

Out of interest, was there a more efficient to get to the virtual cards without using the plus tab?

It was the only thing I used that tab for besides seeing how my interest was accruing so far. It took quite a few taps to actually get to the information I wanted, so given that it’s the feature I was engaging with in the app most often it would be nice to get at those details with greater haste and efficiency.

Can I just test this? It seems to me that a lot of the issues would go away if it worked (almost) exactly the same way as bill pots. Namely:

  • Money comes out of the main account
  • An immediate pot transfer to cover the value

No feed needed for pots, no regulatory changes about pots being payment accounts, no overdraft issues.

The only problem I can see is if you run a low or zero balance in the main account. In which case I wonder if you could extend a dynamic overdraft to cover the value of the pot you choose to pay with, knowing that it’ll only be overdrawn for microseconds?

I get at them from the accounts screen (pull down on the card). They’re listed there.

(I do think that this accounts page needs to be a separate tab - and would have much more utility than the Plus tab. But that’s another conversation).

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I agree, this is how I would want them to work most

So we can decline transactions that will take you below 0, but sometimes due to things like exchange rates changing between auth and presentment we can’t always completely stop you from going negative on the pot, just as we sometimes can’t stop your main account going negative even if you don’t have a overdraft

Our key concern here is burning through our entire PAN ranges very quickly, but we’ve not ruled it out at all

Great post btw :+1:

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And just to add even more to this. Hey I’m on a roll now…

When you create a new category, it takes you to a random icon in the list (so I never really know where I am in relation to the icons)

And from what I can tell, there’s no structure to the order of Icons - there’s little sets of groups, like 3 or 4 ‘food’ related together, but there’s more food stuff elsehwere. Similar with what you might call “Sport” icons. (So I have to scroll for longer to find one suited).

It sounds really minor but it’s just one of those areas where a simple flow would increase my use of the feature, but instead it makes creating a custom category frustating, and knowing I have at least 20 I want… Not sure I want to repeat this process 20 times.

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Ooh, I didn’t know you could pull down. I’m reaching all the way over to my tiny profile icon like some fool. TIL.

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This is a genuine option, but you don’t get the separation of money benefits because have £10 in your virtual card pot doesn’t stop you spending £15 on it, as it will just come out of your main balance

It would be way quicker to build as you say, but we’re not sure it actually solves the problem that most people have

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Thanks for the feedback on this, I will share it with the rest of the team

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Thanks, Adam. I think I’d prefer the main option, too, but was looking for something that might work for the majority and be quicker. But hopefully you can work through the other option soon! :crossed_fingers:

(Edit: although I suppose the same critique could be made of Bill Pots - and folk seem to love those).

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