Alternatively the demographic of staff at Monzo skews very young, and therfore the same set of problems are not as pervasive in the company culture.
I’d also add that the above specified changes - custom categories and virtual cards - are a small subset of the total number of features, and are absolutely on the simpler end; they only require work for the developers within the app not, for instance, interaction with external insurance entities etc.
Do you have a source for this stat, or have you made it up?
Roughly three quaters of the staff are under thirty. So: absolutely yes.
Assuming that those in leadership roles who make the decisions on products though
But the vast majority of the Leadership population are >30, and about 35% >35…
Your repeated assumptions about things with zero evidence (and lots against) doesn’t help the argument at all.
The other day you said everything was too complex and since then you’ve wanted more and more changing that will only make it worse.
Yeah, I think this is a key point. It seems to me that everyone who uses a Joint Account assumes that everyone else uses their JA in the same way.
Our (Both 30+ with a kid) JA reaches zero balance every month. It has a 50/50 contribution from each of us, which is then spent entirely on direct debits for bills & mortgage, with one bank transfer to nursery.
It’s the only way that makes sense to us, but obviously everyone else will have different thoughts. I don’t think generalisations like “everyone over thirty uses a joint account for everything” and “Monzo staff are all young, free and single so joint accounts are ignored” are particularly useful.
At the end of the day, Monzo want to make money. If they think the JA market is underserved by their current offering, they’ll make moves to fix that.
- The majority (61.4%) of the population aged 16 years and over in England and Wales were living in a couple in 2017.
And as the average age for marriage is ~36, that means that this percentage will be higer for older cohorts.
Now, of course you can reply with “but tied to a joint account != living in a couple”, but it’s clealy superior to be able to have a shared view of shared things, with a full feature set.
OK so you did make it up. I can see no evidence in this report concerning the use of joint accounts. Thanks.
The inverse is also true.
Living in a couple != reliant on a joint account
Strawman arguments always add so much to the debate 
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Er, no. I challenged you to show some evidence of your claim that “the majority of Monzo users are likely tied to a joint account” and you didn’t.
You produced some report which does not even mention the words “joint”, “account”, “share” or “bank” and I’m still waiting for you to show some evidence of correlation between marriage and bank account use, let alone relating to Monzo.
I’m not making a straw man argument, I am directly challenging your base working hypothesis.
If you’re going to quote what appear like ‘facts’ you must be prepared to show where you got those ‘facts’ from.
But if you made up the statistic about numbers of Monzo customers using joint accounts, you could just say…?
I’ll say it again…
We love our joint account as it is and don’t need or want half of the stuff mentioned here.
We like the connection to personal accounts, it’s different and it works really well for us who are certainly not “young”.
Perhaps there’s more out there like us who don’t want a big amalgamated mess of personal and joint expenses and like the distinct separation of the two 
For all I care all this could be added, but we’re always reminded that here on the community we’re just a very tiny segment of customers and we don’t necessarily represent the thoughts of the wider customer base.
That’s true. But I put it to you that a joint account is absolutely the superior way for two people with a large set of joint expenses to be able to manage them, and especially one like Monzo’s, if only it could capture the full featureset of the individual account. I mean, can you rationally argue that the personal account needs a better featuerset that the joint?
How does adding custom categories and virtual cards to the joint account do that in any way shape or form?
Yes, quite easily. You won’t listen to it though.
100% agree.
They should be the same. So the handling of financial requirements of any singular person or any couple/partnership can be realised with Monzo. Once the ‘yoof’ mature as age increases, a large percentage will move to a ‘joint’ financial environment. It’s inevitable - driven by buying houses primarily and getting onto, and moving up, the property ladder.
Couldn’t agree more. I think that the above discussion has swerved uselessly off-topic. The idea here is that quite obviously a huge proportion of people rely on their joint, and bringing the features of Plus to the joint account needn’t mean having to deal with all of them.
I wonder if, internally in Monzo, there’s just a big reticence for any team to pick this up and run with it, despite them internally talking about it a lot (as referenced in a comment from a staff member earlier). There’s more glory and less pain involved in working on new features - greenfield over brownfield. You get to say “I built Flex!” on your CV, rather than “well I made some maintenance modifications to this feature and…”. And then there’s the fact that dealing with (a) extant features and code, and (b) a complex set of legal and counterparts constraints (insurance, credit referencing, deals, etc. - all the stuff in Plus) is going to put anyone off; why grasp a project that’s going to be mired in bureaucracy?
But… as I outlined above, it doesn’t have to be so. Custom Categories and Virtual Cards - these are the critical features, and tackling that subset could be fast, deliver a load of user value, and not be mired in frustrating bureaucracy. Forget the discounted airport lounge access and the phone insurance and the metal card; give users the app features that they need.
You making things up to try and back your argument and people talking about how they use a joint account differing from you does not make it off-topic, not everyone is going to agree with everything you say.
