Just seen on a post on Monzos Facebook page that they’re promoting how well they’ve done in each of the categories.
As part of a regulatory requirement, an independent survey was conducted to ask approximately 1000 customers of each of the 17 largest personal current account providers if they would recommend their provider to friends and family. The results represent the view of customers who took part in the survey.
Excellent result for monzo and I think well deserved. The app works brilliantly. I have quite a few criticisms of monzo but the smoothness of the app plus bill splits and shared tabs keeps me with monzo.
I would say, however, that Monzo’s lead is far from insurmountable and the issues we keep seeing with customer service, specialists, difficulty making large payments, problems paying in cash/cheques, etc need addressing sooner rather than later.
How I would rank the banks I’ve had interactions with:
Nationwide
Santander
Starling Bank
NatWest
Tesco Bank
Barclays
Virgin Money
Monzo
Lloyds
These sorts of things are subjective. Parts of what Monzo has done have annoyed me but won’t bother other users. People have different requirements from their bank which is why for me, Santander ranks highly yet is in the bottom half for this survey.
Also noteworthy is that this time, for the first time, Monzo feature in the Nothern Ireland rankings too due to achieving the required threshold level of customer numbers.
They have gone straight in at the number 1 spot there.
Am I the only one who feels like the highest score of 83 is, to be blunt, still rubbish?
To paint it differently, 1 in 5 are not satisfied with the best the industry has to offer. That’s not good enough in my view. If neobanks are only scoring marginally better, and in some situations worse than a few of the older ones, then they’re failing in terms of their mission statements. It feels like complacency.
I do wonder what the “unsatisfied” are unsatisfied about, exactly. Is it customer service, is it features not working how they would like, is it charges that they think are too high?
I also think a lot of these factors will be different for different banks. Some may be unsatisfied at Virgin Money because they are annoyed about the rebrand (and some branch closures/amalgamations as a result). Conversely, others may think their bank isn’t improving their app fast enough.
It would be really good if the survey asked people more follow-up questions, but I doubt it will ever change to be more detailed.
in fairness, to me, the figures here reaffirm the notion that the neobanks don’t have a stranglehold yet, as they’re only marginally better than the ones they’re trying to usurp, and the old ones are still yet to catch up in any meaningful way.
This means there is still room I think, for some extra competition to give the leaders here a run for their money and show them up. There’s still a gap in the market I feel, and I imagine it’s what Chase are hoping to fill. If they can excel where Monzo has in terms of software, and excel where the old ones still perform strongly, and somehow manage to do both with better execution, I can easily see them leapfrog them all with satisfaction in the mid to high 90s (which is what banks should be aiming for, rather than patting themselves on the back for scores in the low 80s).
I imagine it’s some form of combination as it’s an overall score. Monzo and Starling do score quite a bit higher with online and mobile banking, which suggests that’s where they’re performing best, though clearly, still room for improvement.