• £1.50 paid level (I can’t say the word tier anymore )
• Fix international payments in
• Fix merchant data for the love of god
• Allow me to dismiss the fake account
• Cheque imaging
• Post Office counter service
But the BIG thing would be your number 2: real innovation. That is the thing that would make me start recommending Monzo again. I haven’t been able to do that for the past couple of years.
A few suggestions for a lower paid tier at around £2 or less here, but what features would you be willing to lose to justify the £3 decrease without essentially cannibalising the plus tier (sorry @urban) completely to the point of irrelevance.
Maybe I’m missing something, but products like Revolut Plus and N26 Smart are essentially those banks equivalence of what Monzo plus offers, just at a lower price tag.
Off the top of my head, a £2 tier consisting of something like the following:
No interest
Standard hot coral card
No free cash deposits
Standard overseas ATM allowances
Max of two virtual cards
Connected accounts (inc near native functionality when developed)
Custom categories
Google docs integration
Credit tracker
Roundups
Web interface
Additions to Plus and Premium:
Current limits to virtual cards
Disposable virtual cards
Virtual cards connected to pots
Add virtual cards to Google/Apple Pay
Credit card pots (spend on credit card and move from Monzo or connected current account to credit card pot; pot set as bills port for card)
Once virtual cards / pot are a thing, I’d also like to see physical cards as a paid-for option, decreasing in cost per tier (also accessible to non-paying customers). Also a feature where you can digitally send a virtual card to someone to use on your behalf via the Pays would be fab.
I’d be ok with slightly higher than £2 month. £2.50 or lower is probably when I’d start to get interested.
Happy to lose Interest on balance and regular pots, holographic card, offers, free cash deposit, extra free-free withdrawals abroad, free-free allowances.
I would say though that I wouldn’t immediately jump at a lower price option. Monzo would first have to significantly improve the aggregation aspect to bring it closer to what dedicated account aggregators provide.
Complete budget revamp - for all the reasons already said. At best Monzo is “spend tracking” and not true budgeting
Genuine data insights. Said a lot about this with the Plus data export link in the past. But basically make Year In Monzo a permanent, monthly feature. The number one thing Aggregator Apps excel at is data insights. I’d rather this be a regular feature I can look in any day of the year and see live, meaningful actionable data.
A Monzo Credit Card - would rather all my spending be in the same “platform”, if 1 and 2 were solved.
Integration with a S+S ISA / other investment platform. But true and proper integration, not just “a product you can sign up to in Monzo”.
Joint Account Parity
Oh and a final a native version of IFTTT. With IFTTT rolling out Pro, and effectively limiting their free platform, a lot of former integrations are dead, and you can only have three live.
You’ve spoken a lot about Simple. I haven’t used it (not American, obvs), but it strikes me that there are two approaches to the budgeting problems: physical separation (the envelope method) or virtual separation (the safe to spend option).
Now, the problem (as I see it) with Monzo is that they have done both, but haven’t really cracked it with either. What do I mean?
Well, Summary and Left to Spend is on the way to being the safe to spend option. But because it was never finished, and never predicted incoming money, and the algorithms were a bit murky (does it just average your daily spend and assume that you’ll carry on like that?) it never really worked properly.
So along came bills pots. That’s a completely different approach, working on the envelope method of physical separation. But again it doesn’t do the whole job because it doesn’t take into account spending from cards and salary sorter isn’t automated… It’s just not sophisticated enough.
From a blank canvas, my preference would be to split discretionary spending from bills/committed spend in the app (here’s some of my mock-ups on the Dozens community about how it might work for their app, and here are some rubbish old thoughts on here). But I think, given where we are on Monzo, they should just call on-in on the envelope method. I think this would mean:
Card payments from pots
Automation of salary sorter and better tools for squirrelling money away
Your main balance being the ‘safe to spend’ figure (because everything else is in pots)
I’m not quite sure what that would mean for budgets. But wouldn’t it be nice if you could set them, then when your salary hit your account your budgets would get sorted into pots, leaving your main account as spending money, then pots as the source for whatever you’re budgeting for?
I think you’ve just summarised very eloquently the issues I have with Monzo’s budgeting tools that I’ve been struggling to convey in a meaningful way for quite some time!
I’d be perfectly fine with an either/or scenario when it’s done right as you outline.
It’s precisely why the first feature I asked for since the introduction of virtual cards was the ability to link them to pots. As it meant I could then use them in that way for budgeting!
If Monzo can get the algorithms right, then segregated envelope budgeting would work a dream, and they’d go instantly from my least favourite account for envelope budgeting, to arguably the best, and they already have the tools and basics in place to double down on that and get it done.
With this approach, I hope they address the feed so that it’s not full of pot withdrawals followed by the transaction. That ties into my 10th wish though.
There are pros and cons to both methods though, and I think with this one, the main con is that you’re going to get unexpected transactions decline because they can’t pull from segregated money in a pinch, which isn’t an issue with the summary approach.
Personally, I’d like to see them nail both approaches and implement them both as part of a coherent package that compliment and work well together, so you can mix and match for different needs.
My big gripe that I think needs addressing either way is that Monzo’s tools are currently blind to future payments if they’re beyond the scope of your current budget period. I think it’s absolutely crucial that whatever approach they take, you can always clearly see when the next subscription and amount is due, and tailor the algorithms accordingly so that they effect what you have that’s safe to spend, rather just resetting at payday. Bill Pots currently do a slightly better job than summary at this.
I really want to see a connected card ideally a virtual one that I can just use from a pot to pay for groceries (or whatever other uses you want) via Google Pay etc. Or physical card if there’s an actual reason it can’t be virtual.
I want more granular control over my card freeze options, such as Starling. Whenever I freeze my Monzo card, I then have to set it up as the primary in Google Pay, whereas Starling I don’t have to
I completely agree with this - “Jack of all trades, master of none” comes to mind.
The one flaw I find with Monzo’s combined approach - is that there’s no mechanism in any of the tools, to allow you properly plan your long term financial needs appropriately. Maybe in certain limited areas, yes it works, but not for everything. And for a bank that wants you to go #FullMonzo, that’s not ideal.
There’s two big reason why I think that’s a problem too: 1) Monzo are trying to maintain that they are “more than a spending card” - but their budgeting doesn’t really support anything but short term spending (or, rather, doesn’t really treat “savings” as part of a budget). And 2) I suspect that Monzo’s average consumer generally skews to younger users - at least vs other banks.
What I personally think can happen, is that users will begin to “age out” of the feature set that Monzo has, as Monzo’s features aren’t growing to match the financial maturity it’s users develop over time.
That bit aside, that’s why I’d really love for properly integrating an envelope mechanism, and nested categories, and more comprehensive ways to think about Goals, budgeting with actual income not potentially arbitrary numbers, and being able to adjust the budget on the fly.
In short; The budgeting tools are in Silos - and silos are for milk, not budgets.
(edit: why use few word when many word do?)
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Anarchist
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I’d love to be able to select a pot as a “payment source” for external transfers.
Painful at the minute to have to withdraw from a pot and then do a payment, if this could be done in one swoop automatically it would be a massive step up in ui happiness for me