Is Monzo planning on offering a business account?

I’m a property investor and one of my aims is to give my clients as much visibility and easy to understand reports on how we spend their money during the refurbishment stage of a development. I would ideally like this to be in real time. So say a customer gives us £10,000 to refurbish a property i would like them to have real time access to the bank account and to be able to see

  1. what we how much we are spending
  2. when and what we are spending the money on
  3. The balance of the account
  4. We have reporting sheets which we use to update weekly expenditure/ cashflow and another which details all tasks scheduled/ done and a list of all items forecasted to be bought/ bought. It would be great if we could integrate these sheets with our Monzo account. Maybe through static feeds?

Is this something Monzo can provide

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I believe there are no plans at the moment to offer business accounts. I think Monzo are really focusing on the one product and creating a financial marketplace.

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Yes Monzo won’t offer business accounts -

Tide or Coconut take a similar approach to Monzo but are designed for business users.

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Hi everyone

I was wondering whether you’re considering having business or charity accounts when the current accounts are up and running.

I work for a charity that provides phone credit for refugees and displaced people around the world. We are currently running through paypal and are consistently struggling through a myriad of difficulties to get the money where it needs to be. The ability to use something like Monzo would help us infinitely - to be able to have a joint account and card that we can use to purchase vouchers and top-ups online and to be able to see easily and quickly where the money is going. We’ve tried to open business accounts at a few high-street banks, but there’s so many loopholes to jump through that it’s seeming impossible.

Any thoughts on whether this is feasible or not?

Thanks, Sam :slight_smile:

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No they are not going to provide Business accounts. Try Tide and see what they say.

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To provide further context to @anon44204028’s answer, Tide is what Monzo’s co-founder recommends for those interested in business accounts:

See also the previous discussion on this topic:

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thanks @jzw95

I had a bad migraine at the time so could not type much

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Business accounts have have been mentioned before but it’s always ended in “go somewhere else, tide is nice” but… they have some problems that, personally, I’m not happy with at the moment.

Anyway, since they were last mentioned Monzo has launched current accounts giving us a look at what the full bank of the future could be like and starling have started working on them (although… they’re giving annoyingly small amounts of detail despite signing up, talking in the forums & contacting the team).

Before someone shouts me down, I know that Monzo don’t have this on a roadmap but, I thought it might be nice just to see what the community thought of business accounts in case they ever come along in the future, so:

  • What would you like to see in a Monzo business account?
  • If you’re not a business customer, would a focus on business accounts annoy you or would it not bother you?
  • If you are a business customer, what do you think Monzo’s fees would be, and, more importantly, what do you think it would be worth?

I know that my company is 100% ready to ditch our legacy bank but, we haven’t found a decent alternative, it could also be another way for Monzo to break even.

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There is also Fire for companies and Coconut for freelancers and contractors

What I want in a business account is pretty much the opposite of what Monzo provides.

  1. The primary user interface should be my accounting package. I don’t need an app, budgeting tools, or very much of a web interface.
  2. I want a feed of transactions pushing to my accounting package, showing only settled transactions. Anything “pending” which might be updated in the future shouldn’t be pushed.
  3. I want to be able to send payments from within the accounting package using payment details saved in the accounting package.
  4. Being able to split the account into “pots” and issue debit cards to members of staff spending from those pots would be helpful.
  5. I need to be able to pay in cash and get change. Using a service like Loomis for this would be ok.

I currently have business accounts with Barclays, Santander and Handelsbanken. The current accounts are at Barclays, there’s a savings account with Santander and a mortgage (plus vestigial current account) at Handelsbanken. I use Xero for accounts. My experiences:

  • Xero can’t initiate bank transactions — that’s an integration that’s not supported with any bank. It can generate batch files to be uploaded to banks or BACS, which gets part of the way there.

  • Barclays push a feed of transactions to Xero nightly. This is very convenient. When I log on to Xero in the morning I see a list of transactions to reconcile, which if things are working correctly just means pushing the “Ok” button lots of times in the reconciliation interface. (Xero’s reconciliation interface is very good.) The main issue I have with Barclays is that I can’t upload batch payment files. This makes doing the payroll every month very tedious; I have to send around 70 transactions in one day manually through their web interface. (Other issues with Barclays include things like them taking two months to add a new person to the account mandate, but I suspect that’ll happen with most banks!)

  • Santander don’t really integrate with Xero at all. I get transactions from the savings account into Xero using Xero’s screen-scraping integration with Yodlee.

  • Handelsbanken are even less integrated with Xero than Santander. I have to log on to their web banking, download a CSV file of transactions, and upload it to Xero. On the plus side, they support uploading of batch payment files; on the downside, a batch of 70 Faster Payments transactions would be very expensive compared to making those payments through Barclays!

I’m sure that Monzo could build a business current account, but it would be a very different product to the personal account they’re working on at the moment! If they did, I would be happy to pay for it.

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I’d like a business account for my private ltd company that is free of charge. That’s all I want.

At the moment I use Cater Allen because it’s free, but its technology is Stone Age compared to Monzo.

Feature-wise, I don’t need anything more than what Monzo current account offers.

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I’m in the same boat as you.

Me too.

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Why is being free so important for a business account?

Being cheaper than I currently pay would be nice, but it’s not a huge amount compared with my other expenses. For example, for the Barclays current account I pay:

  • £6.00 per month to have the account open
  • 35p per electronic payment in or out
  • £16.66 per month to have a £20,000 overdraft facility (not including any interest)
  • 90p per £100 cash paid in
  • £1.65 per £100 of change (eg. changing notes into pound coins)

Of my monthly bills, about 1/4 is electronic payments, 1/2 is cash paid in, and 1/4 is cash exchanged. The flat rate parts are barely worth mentioning.

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Banking being free is preferable because as a business I have to submit accounting records for expenses like fees, and accounting for all those different fees sounds like a hassle. Even if they’re wrapped up into a single monthly fee, it’s still a hassle I don’t currently have.

I don’t want to have to think about my banking actions in terms of bank fees. I’d rather use a bank that didn’t charge fees at all. It’s just simpler and cleaner.

These would be a must for me as well, from the very small amount of chatter with Starling on their forums it does look like something that they’d be looking at. For us, it’s not too much of a problem, we’re a tech company and I’d be happy to slam Monzo’s API and our accounting package together but it would A) Have to be rock-solid & stable and B) it would be nicer if they built an integration for me and I didn’t have to.

Becuase it’s irresponsible for me to get the company to pay for something when I could get service that is only slightly worse, comparable or potentially better for free. (A couple of these are a prime example for small businesses, especially since they have a very capable API)

I think this is somewhere that Monzo could excel, at least cutting monthly charges and having some charges for various things, with no branches it’s potentially something they could provide while still breaking even.

Absolutely, and these both look like great services but with their own individual problems, for one it looks like fire’s fees could potentially be higher than our legacy bank.

It does seem like there’s at least a small amount of interest around these and it might be something for Monzo to consider (I doubt they ever will but… it’d be nice), something else I’d like to throw into the mix is working IBAN’s & BIC’s in the SWIFT program so that we can accept payments from outside of the EU, being able to hold other currencies could potentially be an idea.

For anyone who’s interested there’s also Revolut business (although their fees are slightly ridiculous) and Transferwise’s borderless account (which will apparently be getting debit cards at some point “soon”). At any rate, it looks like it might be an interesting year for non-traditional business banking, and I would like to see Monzo’s hat thrown into the ring at some point… for now I’m just waiting for Starling to actually work out what they want their business account to be like.

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Reuters published an article titled “Britain’s smaller banks jostle for business banking grants

In which they say;

CEO of app-based bank Monzo told Reuters it was now also tempted to move into the sector, having previously ruled this out.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-banks-competition/britains-smaller-banks-jostle-for-business-banking-grants-idUSKBN1E406O?il=0

Seems a lot of funding is at stake so the temptation is understandable I guess.

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It’s no surprise to see Virgin in there with Govt money on offer.

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And Satander :hushed: