Monzabit

I’ve been looking for incentives to help me control bad habits or start doing more of something good. One way that would surely help is if I were rewarded financially for every day that I’m good and incur a financial penalty for every day that I’m naughty.

Maybe a shared central account for everyone taking part. Automatically paid in by the “naughty” people and automatically paying out the “good” ones.

Fitness activities (e.g running or going to the gym) could be tracked via health kit or motion tracking. Not sure how other habits could be tracked and verified.

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How much is charged per bad day and rewarded per good day would be up for discussion and ultimately decided by Monzo.

Monzo as a company would be able to earn interest on from the central shared account.

I would expect a program like this would require a small initial buy in per participant before they can begin earning it back.

Once you start trying to make rules about what’s considered good and bad, you’re entering some pretty sketchy ethical territory IMO. Particularly with other people’s money. Who would be the moral arbiter of what’s considered a good habit and what’s considered a naughty one?

Some people automatically go to the gym every day because they enjoy doing it - why would anyone financially reward them for doing so? It would be an imbalanced system.

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It would be set by the user who wants to control their own habit. There’s nothing unethical about it.

This is similar to an American app called Pact - http://www.pactapp.com

Problem with their app though is because it’s American and only pays out to a PayPal account it would incur international transaction fees. They also don’t have a way of cancelling an account so the payment card would continue to be charged which I’m sure breaks some kind of law.

There was (maybe still is, not sure) an app that did that regarding gym usage. A good idea in principle but definitely in a separate app, not part of Monzo. The only good habits Monzo should encourage is good financial habits and do that by providing the tools to keep track.

From memory the idea of the app was you decided how many times a week you wanted to go to the gym and what sort of financial penalty you’d consider would be enough of an incentive for you to keep your targets but not enough to cause hardship. The money was then used to reward those that met their targets.

Don’t know if it was a success or if it’s still around but I seem to remember it was in the iPhone 4 days so it could only work by recognising you were in the location of a gym. Easy to fool if your gym is near a pub or by the office.

Ah that’s the one! Anyway my point stands this is not something for Monzo. Being financially fit is a good goal of Monzo but physically fit is the job of other apps.

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Once Monzo’s API is ready, there’s no reason why a 3rd party app developer couldn’t build an integration with a user’s Monzo account, to manage the payments element.

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That’s thinking along the lines of what I was.

I do agree with @EC_Dave that it shouldn’t be a part of the Monzo app itself.

Maybe to prevent future misunderstandings such as this we should have a separate category for integration/plugin ideas. I see a lot of developers in our community so maybe a specific list of things that they know could be popular before they begin development would be useful.

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Yeah, a separate app built using an API would make a lot of sense. Definitely not anything that Mondo devs themselves need to think about.