Would be great to have AI built into the app to answer questions about your finances.
i.e. How much have I spent on holiday so far? When was the last time Carly paid me for pizza? Can I afford £500pm with my current spending?
Tech is out there for this and any info given would need a caveat about accuracy but this would be a great feature and marketing gold!
Especially when it would hallucinate something and someone made a stupid decision based on that, leading to a lot of press attention and blowback
“I cAn’T aFfOrD tO fEeD mY fAmIlY nOw”
Well, that, but also if the AI gives crap advice Monzo might have to bear the responsibility. Like the AI that made up cancellation terms impacting someone financially that they had to be reimbursed for.
Good point. I suppose this is something that we will need to almost legislate for (or nobody will take up AI just in case…)
The day somebody builds AI into banking I’m going back to keeping everything under the mattress.
You realise almost every bank uses AI in the customer facing products to some degree now, right?
Whether it’s for budgeting, guidance, customer support, fraud detection algorithms. It’s there. And it has been for some time.
There used to be an app called Cleo (not sure if it still exists) that was like Emma but worked through a chat interface. Like a hyper focused dumbed down ChatGPT. It worked well.
I think a tightly integrated LLM isn’t that bad of an idea in all. When it’s done right, it can be a powerful augmentation tool. The hard part is doing it right.
In the capacity proposed here, I don’t think it’d be a bad thing. And the margin for error is extremely limited if non-existent. It would literally just be reading from Monzo’s existing budgeting tools for you. LLMs don’t really hallucinate in these scenarios for the same reason Siri can’t yet hallucinate. The restricted functionality restricts the ability to make those errors.
I think you’ve just summarised in one line a book I’ve been reading, very, very succinctly!
The Coming Wave Book (the-coming-wave.com)
But I completely agree. Would AI within Monzo be a bad thing, possibly not. But, it’d have to be done right, and that’s perhaps where I’m not sure I’ve seen any bank get it right, yet
I think it’s knowing what to surface, which is why they limit/put a lot of time into Year in Monzo, so that’s its relatable but also generic enough.
“You’ve spent £0.00 this month compared to £100 for the last 18 months in your Girlfriend category” and that is the sort of thing AI can do, notice the trend, but do you want it to?
Without a doubt
Hi! To find out what I can do, say @monzobot display help.
“Terrible idea”…
I’ll get the Google hit. 
