Hi folks, how’s it going? It’s been a minute so if we haven’t met yet, I’m Kush 
one of the Product Marketers here at Monzo.
I’m dropping in to tell you about some big news from the world of business banking 
Monzo Business has always been about simplifying financial management for businesses and now we’re doing that for a whole new subset of UK businesses with our new plan: Monzo Business Team.
Read the full announcement 
We designed Team for businesses with, well, teams. It introduces new features that make Monzo Business open to bigger, more complex small teams that our original plans Lite and Pro didn’t really cater for.
Brand new features available with Team 
As well as coming with everything you get with Lite and Pro – like invoicing, automatically putting money aside for tax, integrated accounting, and auto-exports for your invoices, statements and transactions – Team also comes with these new features.
Expense cards
For lots of business, allowing staff to make payments on the company’s behalf is pretty crucial to running the business. Which is why we’re introducing expense cards. They let selected team members spend up to limits that the business owner or an account admin set for them with the big added bonus of taking up less of everyone’s time doing admin.
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Owners/admin see all spending – and team members see their own, so everyone has a handle on what’s going in and out.
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Owner/admin sets the limits – setting monthly spend limits gives employees the freedom to spend, while management stays in control.
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Owner/admin sails through admin – receipts, reasons for spending and VAT rates are all there in the app for them to check in one sweep.
Bulk payments
We spoke to lots of business owners and managers who told us that paying employees or suppliers often means copying across individual payee details or approving each and every payment. Bulk payments lets you make multiple payments in one go without all of that manual lifting and shifting.
Uploading your payee details, rather than entering them manually, makes sure that your important payments go through properly. Meaning your team and suppliers get paid on time.
Payment approvals
Another big issue we heard about time and time again was approving payments. With our new feature, business owners and admins approve their team’s payments when they go over certain limits so that teams can get on with their work and managers hold on to some control.
For every expense cardholder, owners and managers can choose how much individual team members can spend on their card and send by bank transfer before they need admin approval.
Bigger team
Last on our list here but by no means least is the ability to manage the business account as a bigger team of people.
Limited companies can have up to 15 team members (including the owner/manager who opened the account!) and set what individual team members can see and do.
The first 6 team members are included, then it’s £5 a month per team member up to a total team size of 15. The team can be made up of people with admin access (3 maximum), collaborator access or expense cardholder access.
Sole traders can have a team of 3 (again, including the person who opened the account), giving team members collaborator or expense cardholder access.
Opening up Monzo Business to bigger small businesses isn’t only about attracting new customers
We love welcoming new customers. Obviously we do. But growing customer numbers isn’t the only benefit to attracting a bigger chunk of businesses. Introducing Team has the added benefit of helping existing customers keep their Monzo Business Accounts as they grow.
We talk to UK business owners all the time. Not all of them have ambitions to grow their businesses, but a lot of them do. By introducing an option that serves the needs of bigger teams with more complex money management, we’re giving those sole traders a banking space to grow into.
As of the start of 2023, there were an estimated 5.6 million private sector businesses in the UK. 5.51 million of those businesses were small businesses with 0 to 49 employees, making up 99.2% of the total. That’s an enormous number of businesses we could be serving and helping to make the day-to-day running of their businesses better. More businesses banking with us benefits not just us, it benefits our other business customers too.
The more businesses we serve, the bigger the range of business types we learn from, from a more diverse spectrum of geographies, sizes, industries, financial positions, ambitions and challenges. And the bigger the range of businesses we have to learn from, the better service we can provide.
This was the first time our Monzo Business research focused on employees rather than just business owners
In bigger small businesses a lot of the financial admin or account management is often shared between people. So we wanted to speak to them to make sure that what we were building would meet their needs.
For example, our research found that in general, employees have low emotional engagement with the spend management elements of their jobs. Sounds obvious enough, but how do you design a product around that? For us, it was about making expense management especially simple to save them time.
Our Research team has stacks and stacks of fascinating insights about how different teams manage a business’ money, complete with archetypes for categorising how behaviours influence engagement with certain elements of the product. Maybe one day they’ll write a blog post about it or publish it in some other way. (Is that something you’d be interested in?) That day is not today though. They’ve worked really hard to get us here and for now I think they’re just excited to see what businesses make of the new plan!
Let us know what you think!
A few of us from the Monzo Business team are here to take your feedback and answer any questions you have over the course of the day.
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