Its Good, but others are catching up - we need incentives/benefits

Lots of people hate banking and math with a passion. They don’t want to run spreadsheets or spend hours going through t&c’s to find the best deal. They just want to receive their pay and spend their money, if the bank can assist in saving some cash they’d already be very happy

1 Like

Well, if you earn £1.5 p.a. on £5k then you got a raw deal as well! But that’s another story! (3% is easily available, which would work out as £150 p.a. - still not the world, but 100 times your figure, and actually quite a decent sum :wink: )

2 Likes

Exactly, the savvy ones will always switch quickly and since traditional banks offer products at a loss by exploiting people who are less savvy you will never be able to hold onto these customers for a long time.
As a business I believe you’re much better off going for the less savvy ones and actually helping them to save money instead of trying to get them into debt so you can rip them off.

I also believe these are the majority of people

2 Likes

Lol I didn’t mean that I would get £1.50 on 5k…i mean, the amount of savings that I have. I would get about £1.50 :joy:

2 Likes

Currently, as it stands Monzo is likely costing me money. Inflation is depreciating the value of my £1, and other banks offer me interest to offset/beat this. Monzo does not. If Monzo are loaning some of my money to make money, then am I just lining the pockets of the monzo directors/stakeholders? Ethically, how are they any better than other big brand banks? Financially, they’re not… which again circles back to my original point - for monzo to be great, we need something back.

3 Likes

Much better rates are available, it’s just people have too much inertia to find them.

If you could have something like a pot, and yet have a choice of 1.5% -> 5% for different terms (say instant or 1-2 years), that’d be really nice though no? That’s what they could do with the marketplace if they can get it right and make it seamless to open accounts and show them within monzo.

1 Like

I think they’ve said they don’t do this (perhaps someone from Monzo can chime in here). There’s quite a lot involved in order to do it to comply with regulations so I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve skipped investing money for now.

Definitely, but then it wouldn’t really be a pot, I guess that would be a savings account.

At the moment, Pots are just somewhere to set aside money without opening another account, that can’t come out of your funds without transferring it back. You know?

Things like : if you go to Costa fortune every day, you put that money aside in a pot so you know what you have left doesn’t include your coffee.

Edit: I think for people that have savings, and care deeply about getting a few extra % then pots aren’t for them, and never will be… (

That’s true. The problem is that these rates need research, planning and effort to get. Most people aren’t bothered to do this work on a regular basis and so don’t/can’t take advantage of these rates.
They might be more likely to open a high interest account if their bank recommends it and it’s simple enough to set up.
I think a LOT of people would have better savings/interest accounts if it was a couple of clicks to set up inside the banking app.

Personally I tried to get a 3% current account last year and after a couple of phone calls a meeting with the bank (for which I had to take time off work, lost money) and a rejection letter two weeks later with no explanation, I gave up and figured I’d already lost more money than I would have saved if the application was successful. Not worth the hassle for me

1 Like

Monzo have already said they’re going to integrate interesting paying products into the app via the marketplace. There’s no need for them to prioritise this though until interest rates rise.

I doubt Monzo will want to offer interest themselves (above the BoE base rate) as they’re not interested in taking on the risky collatorised investments that your regular bank will be using to afford ~3%+

5 Likes

Definitely, but then it wouldn’t really be a pot, I guess that would be a savings account.

Pots to my mind are just a stop-gap till Monzo can handle multiple accounts. Once you have multilpe accounts, there’s really no reason to have things called pots, so I suspect they’ll be phased out eventually.

I disagree about savings, if they truly want to engage people and offer better banking (which they do aspire to), then educating people about savings products and making them dead simple to use is core to that. They can do that using their marketplace though and that looks like the strategy so far.

Pots are there for people who do not want multiple accounts… They honestly will not be phased out. Ever. They are great

They are not for long term saving - they are simply there you help you manage your finances easier

If you feel like that about pots now, I would probably suggest that Monzo may not be for you… Again, I mean that in the nicest way x

4 Likes

I’m not really sure why you’d say that about using Monzo, I’m happy to use them even if my pet ideas are not integrated, it’s not a religion! I’ve been using it a while.

Time will tell about pots, it doesn’t really matter what you call them, however given that banks accounts are a superset of pots, and they’ll need accounts for things like joint accounts, I see no reason to have both accounts and pots in the UI. Perhaps they’ll keep a ‘Pots’ setting to let you call them pots if that makes you feel better about using them. :wink: This distinction of pots vs proper accounts almost exactly mirrors that of prepaid to current account.

My prediction:

Feed will show transactions from/to all accounts/pots as now
Account tab will be renamed Accounts
Pots will become Accounts, all displayed under there (including third party savings accounts which pay interest).

2 Likes

That’s very interesting because I never had such problems. But you do make a valid point there, of course, regarding the effort and possibility of rejection!

(Incidentally 3% doesn’t need much research, as they are well publicised. Higher rates need a bit research though)

I do wonder if Pots are in fact already separate accounts with the Act. No./Sort Code hidden from us :thinking:

This.

They may well be, but they will always be pots to us user end. Not accounts :heart_eyes:

If you get the chance, have a look at uaccount.uk - they have “extra accounts” which are treated in exactly the same way as pots - they have their own sort code and acctnumbers but are in no way treated as separate accounts (their balance is included in your overall account balance) your available balance takes the extra accounts out

Infact, maybe this is the confusion.

Would the idea around Pots make more sense if if it worked like this?

Current account balance £100
Available balance £80

Pot 1 - £20

(Pots are not separate accounts - they are part of your current account)

I agree with this mostly. The novelty has definitely deteriorated. I bought into the hype, and the benefits I bought into (at the sacrifice of paid interest) were promises of being able to manage my money better.

In hindsight and with legacy banks catching up with digital offerings I feel like moving my banking completely to Monzo so early on was naive and may have been a bad idea. My driver was the promise of Targets being available on Android. Although now there are similar options elsewhere, I cba with the hassle of moving accounts again.

The original Monzo incentive/benefit - offering a platform to manage my money better, is slowly improving and Targets is in the pipeline (still). Although I’ve lost faith in the transparency on this when the Monzo web page still leads with “Set targets for your monthly spending” and not a single mention anywhere about this advertised feature being missing for all Android users.

Coming full circle in my waffled reply, I think if Monzo can offer a complete package of their original idea to all of their users, that’s enough of a benefit for me. But lacking that, I want the interest and benefits matched from my legacy bank.

7 Likes

Yeah, I think this is the crux of the problem, isn’t it? Monzo is still lacking loads of features/benefits (financial or otherwise) that other banks offer, while actually having few (if any) compelling features/benefits that are unique to it, and the speed of development/innovation has greatly decreased.

2 Likes

I’ve just realised, Monzo actually does show you that pots are part of your current account and not separate, if this helps anybody :slight_smile:

sketch-1520516182753

1 Like