Hi folks, I just wanted to follow up on our post from Friday. Thanks for all your questions and comments so far - I’d like to address some of your common concerns.
Firstly, I want to assure you that we don’t make decisions like this lightly and without lots of internal discussion. From a personal perspective (as the person who looked into the Image Clearing System initially), I’m deeply disappointed that we won’t have the chance to bring it to you this year. But I also believe it’s the right decision for now.
We’d love to build in-app cheque imaging, and think it’d be a great customer experience. But when it comes to weighing up the potential impact against other similar projects, there’s just not a strong enough case right now.
And it’s not simply a case of cheque imaging vs. Business Banking. We’re working on a number of projects that we’ve had to take into consideration. For example, my team is currently working on SEPA payments - we just don’t have any shiny announcements we can link to yet!
I’d like to clear up another part of the blog post:
Thinking about the first question, for example, less than 0.1% of our customers have ever deposited a cheque! So there’s a good chance that, if we spend our time and effort on something else, we could build something that helps more of you.
Of course, this number is how many people deposit cheques using the current process . You’re right - if we built cheque imaging we’d expect that number to be higher. And features that seem to be low usage can be really impactful to the people who use them (like cash deposits or our gambling block).
But this isn’t the only factor when it comes to decision-making. We also think about whether it lets you do something new (there is at least a process for depositing cheques, unlike cash before our PayPoint setup), and whether there’s anything else we could do elsewhere to help more people.
And building cheque imaging wouldn’t be as straightforward as it might seem. When you directly connect with any payment scheme from scratch, it isn’t just “building the thing”. It’s the cost (both time/effort and actual cash) on exploratory work (for example, in this case, Optical Character Recognition would be a completely new thing for us), physical infrastructure changes, testing schedules etc.
Finally: we’re not taking cheque imaging off the table completely. We just didn’t want to push it back a further X months and again realise that we’re actually not going to be able to work on it. With hindsight (and a bit more forward planning) we perhaps should have spent a bit more time scoping out what was actually required of us before committing to any timelines publicly.
At the moment, we still rely on a sponsor bank for access to a few systems, (cheques included). A long-term goal is to remove these dependencies entirely, at which point we will be required to join the Image Clearing System directly - until then, customers still have the ability to deposit cheques into their Monzo account, it will just have to be done via post (or dropping them off to our London office).
I hope that helps answer some of your questions!