Monzo child account

That’s just how it goes when you grow, though.

It’s fine to move fast and break things when you have a small-ish user base where a large portion will forgive your errors because they believe in the company. When you move fast and break things with 4m+ customers you end up with a lot of frustrated people that couldn’t care less that Monzo wants to be scrappy and agile — they just want a bank that works all the time.

It’s really difficult to go from start-up to scale-up to big business, but if you want to grow your processes have to grow as well.

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It’s not a very original idea, therefore I’m sure they’ve already considered it it!

Exactly this. If there’s anything that the banking meltdowns of the last decade (of which TSB’s is most infamous) have told us, it’s that people expect this kind of stuff to just “work”, and to be dependable. Customers (on the whole) are not prepared to tolerate significant issues or downtime.

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But this just sounds like a legacy bank not a challenger bank

Lets face it the Plus offering is Ok In my opinion but not great (Mainly due to Covid) and With more Covid restrictions coming in travel and other insurances like phone insurance are probably going to be delayed even further

If Monzo did a child account (which would probably just be exactly the same as the adult account but with less functionality and parents able to view) I would sign both my kids up and pay £4 a month (£2 each) no questions asked.

That’s nearly the same as the £5 plus and probably a lot cheaper to maintain.

Plus after 3 months I would definitely still need the child accounts not sure I will still need the plus account if nothing else is coming down the line.

Plus child accounts will pay even bigger dividends later in life when they go Full Monz, not to mention the benefits the kids would get from managing their own money via the Monzo app - it instantly gives them visibility of their money and how to keep track of it - Great for later life.

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Unit economics

Yeah don’t get me wrong Im in agreement. Monzo could well be working on this as we type and about to launch next week.

They should have launched it a couple years ago, we’ve been having these discussions for years now.

They would now probably need to match the £2, or do a Revolut and one kid is free or you need to upgrade to Plus to have two.

I think Plus in its current form is worth about 50p tops.

Edit: Aug 2016 blimey time flies. Four years we’ve been talking about it. :neutral_face:

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So a few years ago they were a fast start-up that could do this and 4 years ago they didn’t want to create child accounts?

This isn’t a profitable direction, maybe one day as an extra but to really drive revenue, this isn’t it.

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I give £4 a month to Nimbl for my two kids cards that they don’t use very often. I’m not sure why it wouldn’t be profitable for them. The only issue is the time to design and create it when there are other things they might value more.

But as somebody else said they may already be working on it, Monzo aren’t very open about the things they do now so who knows :man_shrugging:

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Monzo seem to be very lost, when compared with Starling.

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So you keep repeating.

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I think they (Monzo ) have been very consistent with their unwillingness to provide Child accounts , dont know why you think they are lost with their direction on Child accounts

:upside_down_face:

I’d put it to you that the biggest change has been the banking license. Does regulation of that scale, stifle innovation?

On a 3 month minimum term, plus generates £15 revenue, with £4 initial overhead for the card. We’ll ignore the variable overheads for a second. Two child accounts would generate £12, but cost £8 for two cards.

On subscription alone, you’re not off to a great start.

:point_up:t3: This probably makes it a little bit harder to control, too. With Plus, Monzo can add features at their pace and change the offering to make it more enticing for customers to maintain their membership. If parents find their children aren’t using their card, there’s little Monzo can do to make them.

Well, that depends. See, adults have standing orders and direct debits, alongside their card and cash transactions.

Children, with a much, much lower disposable income (?) have a choice of card transactions or cash withdrawals (on average - I don’t see a 12-year-old cracking out a direct debit for a contract or subscription).

Given we already know how much of a problem cash withdrawals are for digital banks, is it actually cheaper to maintain with those things considered?

Don’t get my wrong, I’ve been banging this drum for years and when I worked in the education sector, I regularly despaired at how little curriculum time this was allocated. Personally, I can’t see how Monzo can do this for profitability reasons. Social enterprise/educational purposes - yes. Profit - I can’t see it.

I may well be wrong, and in 6 months we might see Starling talking about how they’re making 5/10/20% of their revenue from children’s accounts, but until we have anything more than a handful of people saying they’d pay, I’m not sure it’s a given line of profit.

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My comment was more about a child card being low overhead. The card may not get off used for a while month so less chance of fraud, chargebacks etc. “Easy money” for Monzo. Of course I don’t know if my kids profile matches the majority.

Regulation stifles innovation without a doubt.

Monzo have previously said maybe it was a mistake in getting it.

Have they?

It’s not a case they didn’t want to create them. They wanted to focus on their core product which was understandable, it was put on the back burner but never got looked at again like a lot of their projects.

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Yes

Do you have a source?

I’ll try and find one it was their COO looking back from memory but also Tom himself I think on podcast. It wasn’t that long ago.

Edit: here’s one

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