Last week I posted my wish-list for Monzo’s upcoming ‘premium’ product.
On reflection, I can’t help but feel that what I want from Monzo - what I actually ‘need’ - isn’t another current account tier, but a Monzo Credit Card.
To date, I’ve had/have the following credit cards, each with their own various benefits:
MBNA
Nationwide
Nuba
Barclaycard
Amazon (New Day)
And yet I feel there’s a real opportunity for Monzo to offer something better; a credit card that seamlessly integrates with the current account, where the core features & user experience are super polished, and management in the app is (God forbid) intuitive:
A Monzo Credit Card:
Real time notifications - Naturally! It would be nice to have the option to integrate all spend into the current account feed, so that all transactions are in one place.
Intuitive, clear repayment options - I’ve had extremely mixed experiences with the providers above. Some let you pay off your balance before your statement is published (great if you want to keep your utilisation below a certain %), whilst others don’t. I think Monzo could add loads of value here, for instance by having a ‘pay now’ button for the card, which clearly demonstrates the effect this would have on both the interest payments, and the direct debit for that statement cycle.
Pot integration
Round-ups - Wouldn’t it be great if you could set round-ups to automatically pay off the credit card? Monzo could send you a ‘You’ve now made the minimum required payment for this cycle. Would you like to skip this month’s direct debit?’ (etc) notification. This would complement the Advanced roundups feature from Plus too.
Cashback - Credit card providers generate income of c.1.75% between 0.3% (in-person) and 1.5% (online) per transaction via interchange fees. Monzo could pass some back to the user. In my Premium wish-list, this came 2nd in the poll (marginally behind Phone Insurance).
Competitive APR
No international fees
The other perks/features have been discussed before (now closed) but honestly, if Monzo could nail my core wish-list then I’d sign up in a heartbeat.
This would bring all my main spending into Monzo’s ecosystem. Monzo would profit through both interchange fees and interest payments. Similarly, it may attract new users to Monzo’s other products and help drive profitability. Isn’t this a no-brainer?
Bonus points if they could offer this via Visa to hedge the bets in case the MasterCard network fails.
As much as i think a monzo credit card is logical and would make alot of monzo customers happy id ask that they please please dont touch a credit card for another year.
They have already spread resources too thin and the current account is falling well below the standard needed. We dont need another half baked implementation.
Let them focus on first i feel:
getting proper support for joint accounts
they need to make plus a winner and it needs a lot of love to get there
business accounts needs to be expanded also to become more profitable
theyve also decided US accounts is a bigger fish so that needs time to pay off also
I’d like this (a monzo cc) but think the time has come for a global feed - we should be able to see a feed for every account (including connected accounts, pot accounts and virtual cards), and also have one global feed with notifications, and transactions from selected accounts all in one place.
The simple features you list above and proper integration would make it really attractive for many customers, and presumably monzo could make decent money from this, like other card providers.
A joint account should just be an account that has many users, features should be launched at the same time for them. A kids account could be the same. A shared bills account for friends could also be the same.
Edit: You are correct! Updated to reflect. I wonder if Brexit will mean the EU cap is revisited.
Regardless of the figure I’d like to see Monzo offer Cashback - whether it needs to be a higher rate for select retailers, and a lower rate elsewhere, that would be their challenge to solve!
The UK government has pushed to apply the cap to business cards as well as personal. Amex without co brand is the only exception under the current cap on personal cards.
In what sense and how does this impact rolling out features to this account type? I’m genuinely interested.
Clearly there are legal problems to do with authorisation for certain actions like withdrawal, but once those are dealt with, why do shared accounts have to be constantly behind and treated as an entirely separate product?
When youre acting on behalf of yourself and one other person when signing up for things like monzo plus, insurance, monzo offers, freezing cards etc
Its just the added complexity of acting on behave of 2 people instead of just yourself i feel that adds the extra time needed to get things right
Although all the above is just my assumptions from reading the forum inputs from staff members over the years.
But im in agreement with you that whatever these extra complexities are over time these should be accounted for earlier and taken into account earlier so that joint accounts can be compatible with the newer features much sooner
I wonder, even if Monzo wanted to do this, they would be able to execute this properly.
They would need:
quite a lot of Capital to roll it out
more confidence in their credit lending models than I think they currently have
Either new staff or training existing ones on Section 75 etc
If they wanted to go down this route, it might make more sense for them to offer a white label Jaja service and then build in any Monzo specific software features they want in their app.
I’d really love this, too. I have to keep another bank account open, in order to have a credit card there. I’d much prefer to be able to move that to Monzo. And you make great points; there’s money to me made here. For me it’s between having this and an actual cross-account-cross-investment budgeting solution built in.
I wish someone had come up with that at one of their hack days . It’s a shame that they stopped those, and in fact that they pretty much stopped development on the API altogether .
. It’s a shame that they stopped those, and in fact that they pretty much stopped development on the API altogether 
.