Hey everyone 
For those of you who are new to the community, I’m Ross, one of the product marketers working on our subscriptions products and I’ve got some exciting news to share 
Today, we’re introducing Extra, Perks and Max – 3 brand new ways to upgrade your Monzo personal account based on what’s important to you.
Read our blog post for the full announcement
I know the first question some of you will have is what this means for Plus and Premium. If you’re a Plus or Premium customer and you’re not ready to move to one of our new plans, you don’t have to give up your subscription. More on this a bit later.
Before we get into that let me quickly summarise the new plans. (You should read the blog post first if you haven’t already done so.)
Extra – make money that bit easier
£3 a month • Aged 18+ • UK residents only • Ts&Cs apply
Extra gives you the best of Monzo Plus money management tools with the addition of our brand new credit insights feature to help improve your credit scores and ultimately, your credit health.
Perks – the best things pay for themselves
£7 a month • Aged 18+ • UK residents only • Ts&Cs apply
Perks gives you everything you get with Extra as well as our best savings rate of 4.60% AER (variable) interest on your Instant Access Savings Pot and Cash ISA, a weekly Greggs treat and an annual Railcard.
Max – get more life for your money
From £17 a month • 3 month minimum • Aged 18-69 • UK residents only • Ts&Cs apply
Our Max plan gives you everything you get with Perks and worldwide phone insurance, worldwide travel insurance, and UK & Europe breakdown cover. You have the option to extend your phone, travel and breakdown cover to your family for an extra £5 a month. (As you might expect, there are exclusions for this.)
Some background on this launch and why we made some of the decisions we did
The blog post explains a few of the key decisions but I wanted to go into more detail here. I know you’ll be interested to understand more about how we got here and what influenced our approach, particularly in relation to Plus and Premium.
We’ve designed the new plans to give you more choice
It’s been almost 4 years since we launched Monzo Plus and 3 years since we launched Monzo Premium. That’s a very, very long time in Monzo years. A lot’s changed since we introduced those subscriptions to the world.
The biggest change is the number of customers we serve. We have more than 9 million people banking with us now and that comes with a much bigger range of needs and wants. Launching three separate ways to upgrade your Monzo account gives people more choice to pick something that best suits what’s important to them and where they’re at in life.
We did a lot of research, speaking to more than 45,000 customers and considered a lot of different options for these new products. We looked deeply at the Plus and Premium data to see what people use and what they don’t. We’ve added benefits that we believe will be regularly delightful to a lot of people (like a weekly Greggs treat) and dropped things that were being used infrequently or by a very small number of people (like lounge access). More on that below.
You can choose to keep Plus or Premium if you already have them
If you have Plus or Premium, and I know a lot of you do, you can keep your subscription with no changes to how you use it at all. The only change we’re making is that if you cancel or move to one of our new plans you can’t get Plus or Premium back.
We really believe these new plans are the future of upgrading your Monzo account. We’re not selling Plus and Premium any more, which allows us to focus more of our time and effort on adding even more value to Extra, Perks and Max.
Extra is for people who want to pay a little… extra, to get advanced Monzo money management tools
If you’re someone who loves their custom categories and seeing your different bank accounts and credit cards in the Monzo home screen, now you can get all of those advanced money management tools without the added frills.
Before now, you’d have to pay the £5 monthly payment for Monzo Plus and get things like special offers and a special card. With Extra, you can make use of the tools you like for a smaller monthly payment of £3.
We’re introducing a proper option to extend cover to your family
Monzo Premium’s family cover only applies to the travel insurance (not the phone insurance) and it only covers your family when you’re travelling together.
We wanted to a) make this better, and b) make it optional, so that customers can choose the right level of cover to suit their needs.
With Max, we’re adding breakdown cover to the mix. This means for £17 a month you’ll get worldwide travel insurance, worldwide phone insurance and UK & Europe breakdown cover in any valid vehicle, as a passenger or a driver. As well as everything else you get in Perks, like 4.60% AER (variable) interest on Monzo Instant Access Savings and Cash ISA, a weekly Greggs treat, an annual Railcard, and much more.
But Max also allows you to extend all your cover to your family for an extra £5 a month (£22 a month total), meaning that you, your partner and dependent children get travel insurance, phone insurance and breakdown cover. Not just that, you’re all covered even if you’re travelling separately. And it’s the same with the breakdown cover too. You and your family are covered in any valid vehicle as passengers or drivers. There are some exclusions for this, which you can read here.
We’re going back to our roots with our new card designs
Perks and Max come with their own brand new card designs: Bold Coral and Burnt Coral.
They’re part of the Hot Coral family because launching our new plans was always about giving customers more Monzo. It’s about giving you ways to make Monzo more you while being firmly rooted in everything we know people love about our original current account and all the brand elements that come with it. Naturally, Hot Coral is a big part of that.
This is partly inspired by feedback we’ve had from a lot of people since launching Plus and Premium. We’d hear how people love the benefits on offer with the subscriptions but the blue or white colour cards just don’t feel Monzo enough.
Our Brand Design team spent months and months testing and experimenting with our card manufacturer to come up with card designs that felt like suitable elevations of the Hot Coral card. We’re super proud of them and we hope you will be too.
We’re moving away from metal
We know some of you are going to be asking, “Why no metal card?”. Metal cards are marmite. Some people love them, and others don’t see the point.
The honest truth is that the metal cards we have right now are expensive to make and we wanted to squeeze a wider variety of value into the Max monthly payment.
It’s also no secret that metal cards have been a point of frustration for some customers. We know that ATMs can sometimes swallow or reject them. We’ve seen reports of them being marked easily too. Then there’s the replacement charges which are tied to the cost of manufacturing them.
We’re not writing off having a plan that includes a metal card in the future, and we’re always exploring new card materials, designs and options. But it wasn’t a priority for us this time round.
We cover this in the blog post but just to repeat: if you have a metal card that you’re not ready to part with but you like the idea of moving to one of our new plans, you can move to Extra, Perks or Max and keep your metal card until it expires.
Our new plans aren’t joint account compatible… yet
We heard your disappointment after my last post on this and we actually started work on joint account features back in December. But we quickly realised:
- how much work was involved in shipping these new plans for personal accounts, and
- how much work was involved in getting joint account compatibility to a level that we think is good enough.
I know we’re asking for a lot of patience but I want to reassure you that we will get to this. Once we’re happy that we’ve successfully launched these new plans for personal account customers and they’re working like we expect them to, joint accounts are the next thing on our list.
We’ve made Greggs one of our leading partner perks
With Perks and Max you can claim any of these things from Greggs every single week: a sausage roll (classic or vegan), any regular sized hot drink like a Hot Chocolate or a Caramel Latte), a doughnut or a muffin.
We did a substantial amount of surveys and customer interviews, and one of the things that came out loud and clear was that the idea of getting a coffee or snack of some kind as part of the deal was a big draw for people. And when you know that Greggs is the top merchant for Monzo customers in this category, Greggs becomes the obvious partner for us to work with.
They have a great range of items they offer as part of the deal, they have nearly 2,500 shops across the UK and the experience of actually claiming your treat is smooth and delightful in a way that feels very Monzo (not available at MOTO forecourt locations).
Don’t believe me? Just look at Hernan’s face and tell me I’m lying. Here he is claiming one of the first ever Monzo x Greggs sausage rolls like he’s just won Olympic gold.
We’ve made a Trainline Railcard one of our leading partner perks
The story’s much the same with Trainline and their Annual Railcard. Our research showed that saving money on train travel would be a big plus for people, particularly for people who don’t drive, which typical packaged bank accounts don’t always cater for. And anything that encourages train travel is a small win for the environment too.
The Trainline Railcards on offer through Perks and Max mean there should be something for everyone. Aged 18–30 or 60+? You’re eligible for one of the age category Railcards. Aged between 31 and 59? There are a range of Railcards available for travelling with friends, partners and family members as well as Railcards for travelling in certain parts of the UK.
We’ve taken credit tracker and made a more powerful version of it in credit insights
We heard from subscribers that building up their credit health was one of their main goals, but that we weren’t doing enough to help with it. The credit tracker you get with Plus and Premium is a nice little feature that shows you your credit score and how it changes each month, with a few ideas on what you could be doing better. But we wanted this to go further.
With our new plans you get credit insights, which is a brand new feature that takes the solid foundations of credit tracker and constructs a multi-story building on top of it. One of the big benefits is that you can track not one but two of your credit scores, with weekly updates from TransUnion and Equifax.
We’ve focused closely on giving you clear, impactful actions that help improve your credit scores and credit health. They’re specific to your situation, they show the estimated impact on your score, and we let you track them through to the moment they show up on your file.
You can now see your full credit report laid out clearly, as well as feedback on things like how your Flex use might be helping you build a healthy credit history.
That’s just what’s available now. The team has lots of ideas for how to make this even better, and we’re already working on a few of these. Over the next few months, we’ll add real-time alerts when things change on your credit file. We’ll also show your Equifax credit report alongside your TransUnion credit report, so you can see where things differ, and make it easy to report any issues back to the credit reference agency.
Finally, we’ll help you understand what Monzo products you could be eligible for. We know this matters to some people a lot, but is less important to others, so we’re thinking carefully about how to get this right. We’d love your thoughts along the way!
Our new plans don’t include discounted lounge access, special offers or cashback on international transfers
We chose not to include these because our research showed that only a small proportion of customers were getting the full advantage of them, and there were lots of other features that people would value more.
So a bit like with the metal card, we wanted to find a way for a wider range of people to get value from their monthly payment for Extra, Perks or Max.
What next? What does the future look like?
It’s taken a monumental amount of work to get us here. This is almost definitely the biggest, most complex product launch Monzo has seen when you think about the multiple plans, numerous partners, the fact that they contain insurance products, Plus and Premium already exist, and so on and so on.
To show you just how big it is I’ve broken the launch down into numbers.
- 3 new plans (with 1 family add-on)
- Built by 57 Monzonauts
- Over 16 months
- Shaped by feedback from 45,000+ customers
- With no less than 50+ initial naming options
- 2,000+ pull requests (this one’s for the coders)
- Across 96 Figma files (this one’s for the designers)
- And 500+ card samples
- Fuelled by 100+ sausage rolls
- Scrawled across 1,000+ post-its
- 2 weddings
- And lastly, 3 new arrivals
But. Launching is just a milestone on the long road ahead of us. There’s so much we want to do with these new plans (again, joint accounts is top of the list but we want to add new features and benefits too) and we intend to bring all of you along on that journey.
Things may have been a bit quieter in here lately as we’ve knuckled down to prepare for this launch, but we’d like to get back to the levels of engagement we had before. In the meantime, let us know what you think! And if you have any questions we’ll do our best to answer them for you.
Thank you 
when the kids get phones, the £22 a month plan is an absolute necessity too
