https://www.ft.com/content/ca34eede-7587-11e9-bbad-7c18c0ea0201
Couldn’t access that directly as I’m not a subscriber, but if you do a google news search for ‘Monzo’, you can get to the text.
Britain’s fintech companies are trying to expand beyond their young, metropolitan customer bases and hoping they can attract older customers and people left behind by traditional bank branch closures across the country.
In recent months, Monzo and Starling have made it possible for customers across the UK to make cash deposits while Revolut has simplified its customer contract to make itself more accessible.
Last Thursday, Monzo began a roadshow of the UK in Manchester, inviting attendees to discuss barriers to banking. About a third of Monzo’s 2m customers live in London and less than 5 per cent are over 60.
Monzo said it wanted to appeal to a broader range of customers, including those vulnerable to being in financial difficulty. Last June, it introduced a feature that let customers block gambling transactions.
“We want to solve problems like that for all kinds of people, not just 25-year-olds living in London,” said a spokesperson. “Whether you’re an elderly person living in the countryside, someone struggling with mental health issues or you’ve been made homeless, having a bank account you can manage is an essential part of everyday life.”
(Much more in the article, but didn’t want to steal the whole thing!)
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Here’s a free gift link https://on.ft.com/2IkT5ha
There seems to be a lot of people that pay for news sites such as the Financial Times on here.
Am I missing out on something huge here or are you all on corporate accounts or something?
“About a third of Monzo’s 2m customers live in London and less than 5 per cent are over 60.”
You could rephrase this as “Over two thirds of Monzo’s customers live outside of London and over 100,000 are over 60.”
Funny how moving a few words around can paint a completely different picture.
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it’s a decent newspaper, I’d pay for it tbh but don’t read enough of it to justify it.
Weirdly despite being in the UK the only newspaper I do pay for is the New York Times because they publish so much I want to read, i always hit my limit and its a hassle to open new incognito windows every time. I kinda wish the Guardian would do a paywall with easy subscription options (NYT let you pay by apple pay so its literally one tap on the website and done) but instead they just have annoying banners that you filter out.
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Paywall 
Free to register for 1 article per week
Spoiler alert – the “digital bank” referenced in the subtitle is Tandem, not Monzo 
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The preview references ‘hipster banking’ so I’m not going to bother signing up to read it 
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Nice to know I’m not the only one they’ve ignored complaints wise. I’ve had the issue sorted but no word of a final resolution letter or acknowledgement that a complaint was even recorded at all.
I dread attempting to get my account closed…
This is why I don’t pay for the telegraph anymore it’s just poor media
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And why I won’t register for a free account either 
I feel most media nowadays is “ClickBait says you’ll click here”
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Unlike with the papers he probably cannot claim that someone else wrote the click bait headline, but overall it is reasonably fair:
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@SouthseaOne I was quite taken by this quote:
Before you know it, the big banks will just see statements that say: Monzo (auto top-up) £200.00. You know that I am doing things on Monzo, but you have no idea what, why or where I’m doing it. In other words, the financial intermediary who never believed they would be disintermediated, has been disintermediated by a new intermediator. A data intermediary. The lifeblood of the bank’s future – customer data – has been stolen by a new middleman: the intelligent intermediator.
I suspect that for this reason, big banks will be looking to become the account aggregator
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I’ve re-read this a number of times now and just can’t see:
- The point in the headline (clickbait overload); and
- What he is actually trying to say
Claims that a “discretionary” account is unlikely to be a “main account” but then says how this is actually damaging for the old banks?
Not sure If I am missing some nuance or larger picture 
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I think the headline is clickbait. However, I agree with what he’s saying.
- That many in the financial services industry will be tempted to say that challenger banks don’t matter because most customers don’t use them as their primary account, instead still paying their bills from their legacy account.
- However, that perception is wrong, because in the new world, it’s all about the data, and the legacy bank will have less and less. Moreover, the relationship the customer has will be with the challenger bank, with which ties will be harder to sever.
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