Intro to Core Experience 🎉

[michaelw90 (Michael)]

For me, and I know that there may already be work on this. I’d like to see Merchant Data given the same care and attention on the main accounts as it is on connected accounts. Too many are still showing inconsistent names, or whatever.

Please port that piece of work to the main account transaction reporting flow.

[kolok]

Great to know you all, now we know who to tag

I second merchant data, i’d really like to see some kind of trust access so once a contributor has had a few approved submissions their corrections automatically get approved.

[berth (Bert)]

What a great team to have!
Keeping a focus on core experiences is a tricky but very worthwhile thing to do, in my opinion.

[Chapuys (Kevyn)]

Feel like Monzo have been a sleeping giant whose just woken up! I can’t wait to see what changes/improvements come to the Core Experience. Hi everyone from the new team!

[Peter_G]

Before I get into my megapost (), I thought it worthwhile to say that a big part of this could helpfully be looking at the joins between different teams’ work in the app and making sure that things are as integrated and magical as they could be.

In linked posts, I’ve talked about Get Paid Early not playing nicely with Summary/Trends. It’s an old example but a good one where it feels like we can see the joins.

Another example would be working out how to really push Monzo to be imaginative and integrate features to deliver what no one but Monzo can. My recent post below is a good example: what would need to be true to have this level of innovation and join up across different areas of the app?

Introducing Monzo Flex – a better way to pay later

Here’s a little bit of Monzo Magic that would make the Flex repayment super special. At the moment, the notes field has the name of the merchant you’re repaying, but with “and N more” if there are more than two. Instead of (or as well as) that, how about using the receipts API so that you could tap and see a breakdown of everything that you’re paying for, merchant and repaid value? Effectively that month’s Flex statement digitally in the app. And, taking that one step further, how about a lin…

[giorgio (Giorgio Baglioni)]

What do we win Gonna have to block out some calendar time each day

[giorgio (Giorgio Baglioni)]

Hey @Paulw, it’s great to be here!

Totally agree! Payments tab is definitely one (of many) area that needs some attention! Do you have any thoughts on what isn’t working right now for you? @Heldiney and @chloelawrence

[giorgio (Giorgio Baglioni)]

@Peter_G

Brace yourselves everyone, I’m brewing up a megapost. I’m sorry in advance.

Yes please We cannot wait

[JIMMWX (Village Idiot)]

I have nothing to add other than the level of interaction here between Monzo and customers is

[N26throwaway]

Someone must be desperate to dethrone @TheoGibson’s team at the next Peter G awards!

[TheoGibson]

@N26throwaway

Someone must be desperate to dethrone @TheoGibson’s team at the next Peter G awards

I haven’t told you yet about my new team at Monzo yet - it’s called the free money for community members team

[Peter_G]

And the Life Award goes to…

[Peter_G]

@giorgio

Yes please We cannot wait

Wait no longer! (Well, have this and wait a bit more. Much more incoming )

Let’s get straight to it.

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Support

So much to say, but let me limit myself to the tech:

• You (still) can’t go and look at previous chats without starting a new one. That seems to waste everyone’s time. Can we browse old stuff without starting a new one?

• The Monzo chat system doesn’t do capitals. At least on Android. So the first letter is always lower case; the same after a full stop. Please fix this. It makes me irrationally angry.

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Transaction screen

• The payments history section was great when Monzo was little. But now we have years of history it feels like it needs to be a bit more sophisticated. With inflation, I’m not sure the average over all time figure is useful. Instead, perhaps rolling average over the last 12 months? It would also be super cool to be able to tap on the figures and be taken to some Trends analysis…

• Tapping on the number of payments field is inconsistent. It seems to search on the name rather than a unique ID. So if I find a faster payment to myself, the number of payments is correct, but tapping into it shows many more transactions, because it’s searching for my name not for that specific sort code/account number combination.

• You can’t upload PDFs as receipts. As I get a bunch of those from email now, that’s annoying.

• On Android, the raw direct debit data (the bit right at the bottom of the transaction screen) is missing. It really needs to be there - it helps when things go wrong or merchant enrichment isn’t quite right.

• Similarly, on Android, faster payments references go into the notes field and can be amended. On iOS it’s a separate field. That feels more robust to me. A cry for parity!

• #tags don’t autocomplete on Android. They do on iOS (if you turn it on in Labs). It’d be cool to make more of tags - having them in a separate field would be cool. And being about to see them in Trends (as an alternative to the category or merchant view) would be next level. Alternatively (or in addition) having tags as subcategories would be cool.

• There’s no way of manually entering data into the receipts API. I’ve said before it would be nice to link that into the Flex transactions, but I’d quite like to be able to enter line items myself. Bonus points if we can categorise/tag each entry separately or use them to drive splits/tabs.

• It would be good to have more granularity on the repeating payments option. I have a direct debit that is taken three times a month but at irregular intervals. It would be excellent to cope with more edge cases. Can you basically borrow repeating appointments from your favourite calendar app everywhere that needs repeating dates?

• Conversely, and I’m very keen for this can we please label incoming payments (think salary) as repeating so that the Balance bit of Trends works? Manually created future transactions so Monzo knows that there’s a payment planned for the future would help too.

• The “Flex it” box is a bit too big for my liking. Could it be slimmed down? (My personal preferences are the most important feedback obvs).

• When you go to change a category, can we just have the categories in alphabetical order? The artificial distinction between custom and standard categories isn’t helpful (for me at least). And we’ll get to it, but the 50 category limit is bad. Very bad. It makes me sad.

That’s it for now. I’m going through the app so this might take some time. More (much more) to come.

Edit: a few extra things for the transaction screen:

• Can we find a way to pull/push the value of a transaction to/from a pot? If I pay in £50 cash I’d like to be able to tap on the transaction and send that directly to a pot, or to pick an existing payee and send it to an external account. Similarly, I’d love to be able to tap on a card payment and pull that value from a pot.

• A PDF statement for individual transactions is a popular request. That would also help meet this need…

[Peter_G]

Next instalment:

The Feed.

Granted, many of these might be more for #app-evolution, but I thought it’s worth covering here.

• It’s really difficult to scrub to different years. Other apps find a way of the scroll bar being used to jump around if there’s a lot of scrolling. That would be handy here.

• We really need parity of search between Android and iOS. I want to be able to search/filter by date, merchant, location, payment type (MasterCard/faster payments/Bacs), card (physical/virtual) and how it was paid (Google Pay, chip and PIN, contactless etc). That lot of information could also handily be on the transaction screen.

• I’d like to be able to sort the feed by something else other than date. For example by values, by merchant, or by country. In the latter case, some collapsible subheadings would be groovy.

• Once you’ve sorted / filtered to your hearts content, it would be nice to be able to export that data. Or set up a live Google sheets export…

[amc65 (Andrew)]

Joint account love please - @davidwalton has posted many times on the topic. Obviously not all have these but those that do would love them to be comparable with single accounts.

[jzw95]

@Peter_G

We really need parity of search between Android and iOS.

Search on iOS is definitely better than (what I understand) is on Android, but it still needs some work. Critically, there’s no way to search for a specific amount or transactions on a specific date. This makes it very difficult to locate a transaction sometimes and I’ve had to resort to exporting to a spreadsheet . Amazingly even Nationwide’s basic app can do these two things easily, so this is not an advanced feature. Especially for a bank that doesn’t allow access through a desktop browser. <\rant>

[Peter_G]

I think it was @emmag that said if they were going to look at it, they’d rebuild it from scratch for both platforms. Which I think is the right approach. It definitely needs doing, though.

If @giorgio and team want two big things to get their teeth into, my votes would be search and filter (top priority) then the payments screen.

[Paulw (Paul)]

Welcome @giorgio There’s been loads of discussion over the years. Some old stuff but some still relevant here:

Improved payee management

Just because I can’t see it here to vote on… We’d love to be able to: merge existing payees to create a single contact create a new payee without making a payment add pictures to contacts edit the details of an existing contact

I think the Payment screen is a bit messy currently and could do with a tidy up. Recent and Frequent seems overkill for example. Other things:
Payee details
I’d love to see payee enrichment similar to how Monzo does merchant enrichment. So the payee has the name, photo/image and previous transactions to/from them on the payee screen. Crucially when the payee pays you it’s the same enrichment as displayed in the contact rather than a hotchpotch of display names that we get now. I’d like the ability to hide Monzo contacts I’m never going to pay. Plus bring back merge payees. It’s gone for me.
Shared tab
I currently have an outstanding owe. This is because I used my joint account with an external person. It’s now saying my partner needs to pay me. They don’t because it was from joint account. There’s no way to settle this so I’m stuck with Friends owe you £XX.
Scheduled
Some proper order to this list. It’s very random right now. Oh and please add Plus/Premium to scheduled payments What about including scheduled payments from pots here as well.
Request
This doesn’t work so well. If I choose a non Monzo contact it brings up the Monzo.me screen then I have to choose the contact in the share sheet. I’m therefore not sure why the list of contacts is there. Perhaps this could be smarter. After all, you have access to my phone contacts so perhaps it could somehow select that contact to send the link to without the need to select via the share sheet.
I look forward to seeing how this develops. Thanks for your input.

[Peter_G]

The megapost continues!

Pots

• The create Pot flow and UI could do with a bit of TLC and updating. It just feels basic and very Mondo right now.

• If we’re going to get rid of the card carousel, we’ll need better ways of getting money to/from Pots. I’m all in on the put pot transfers in the Payments tab idea. Treat pot transfers just like any other - including the ability to send directly from a pot to an external account.

• And let us send money directly to a Pot from an external account! A little bit of Monzo magic where you put the pot name as a #tag in the payments reference perhaps. So #Bills would go straight to my Bills pot without bouncing through my current account.

• Let us pay for bills from savings pots! And make them instant access. Plsthx.

• Here’s a big one for me: tweak the Left to Pay section under the manage tab for bills pots so it’s clear what transactions are in this period and what are in next. At the moment, tapping Upcoming gives me a chronological list of payments that will come from that pot. I’d like a nice division between what’s left this budgeting period and what’s in next. With subtotals please!

• I get why there’s a division between virtual card payments and DD/SOs here, but I kinda just want one chronological list. Maybe an overlaid icon to show what type of transaction it is?

• I’d really really really really like to be able to tell Monzo not to expect the next upcoming payment. This month and next I don’t pay council tax. I’d like to be able to tell Monzo to take that into account. Basically, let me add/remove/manage future transactions please.

• I’m not sure why Monzo Products have a separate section. And when you tap into it I just get all scheduled payments to select from. So this feels like a bug/mislabeling.

• But for everything good and proper in the world, can we please have the ability to pay for Plus/Premium from a pot? Please.

• Finally on the manage tab, I worry that total deposits/withdrawals make even less sense than on the transactions screen. My bills pot value is now immense. I’m not sure what the right answer is. 12 month rolling average? Last calendar year? It would be a shame to lose it completely.

Edit: late addition!

• When a direct debit is showing in the feed, the predicted value doesn’t change in bills pots or the payments tab. It really ought to - it’s a nice bit of gloss, but it also just makes everything work a bit more smoothly.

[Peter_G]

@Paulw

Payee details
I’d love to see payee enrichment similar to how Monzo does merchant enrichment.

This is so so important!

I thought that creating payee groups would lead to that, but alas no.

I do think the whole payees system / interface needs an overhaul. Most high street bank apps (not to mention Starling) have a better, more intuitive UI.

I’d start again from first principles.