I agree paying interest is going to be important long term - pots are not good for people financially if they don’t pay some sort of interest, because the value of savings will decline rapidly in real terms. This will become more important as interest rates normalise. You probably shouldn’t expect this sort of financial incentive from Monzo though, it’s just not their focus, and they’re a long way from offering it.
The hurdles for Monzo to start paying interest seem to me pretty steep since they are building a bank from scratch - they’d have to invest the money, hedge the risk that involves, this might affect their Capital requirements and risk assessment too? They’d probably also have to convert pots to real accounts if offering interest there (though I think personally that’s inevitable in the long term). Seems to me they are focussed not on offering financial products but on offering a gateway to lots of products from other people.
So it may take a while for Monzo to get to the point where they offer financial products like this, and in a way I’m not unhappy if they can expand their marketplace first to include good savings accounts (ISAS, S&S ISAS), and show you the savings total in the app, that could replace pots for most uses (except short term savings of small amounts of money). I suspect we might see that well before we see any sort of interest bearing accounts from Monzo itself.
I’d love to see in the long term though a fintech bank truly rethinking products like savings accounts, mortgages, insurance from the ground up, and offering customers a much clearer view into the pricing of those sorts of products and the tradeoffs involved. They couldn’t magically change the way say mortgages work, but they could offer a much fairer, clearer approach to them. We won’t see that for some time though, the focus for now is on offering a UI and a gateway, not traditional banking products.