Came here to post this
Key points for me:
“We learned that things that seem a universal truth when you are 50 people, launching iteratively as no one is paying attention, when you do that with 3.5 million customers it’s foolish,” Blomfield said.
Blomfield said Monzo’s plan was to float within three to four years and he expected the firm to be profitable by then.
Tom Blomfield, the 34-year-old founder and CEO, told Reuters he expected Monzo to top 2,000 staff this year, up from 1,500.
And
Blomfield said Monzo planned to relaunch the paid-for accounts in the first quarter of this year, implementing lessons learned from complaints following its botched attempt in 2019
And this, any day/ week now 
reality bites the ‘challengers’
@rarther, great article. Thank you for sharing!
That Sifted article mentions that Starling has not been funded by venture capital funding cash. What is it funded by?
Harold McPike
Only linking this article coz it shows just how rich he is
Monzo plans to hire up to 500 people and forecasts it will get 5.5 million users this year
If that’s 5.5 million additional users (~ 9 million total users), then that’s crazy growth.
If it’s 5.5 million total users, it seems pretty slow growth.
It will be that.
As it is just under 4 million now, I don’t think adding 1.5 million in 10 months is ‘slow’.
I would assume the latter, it could just be a conservative estimate, since they achieved ~2.5 million new customers last year with a TV ad campaign boosting sign ups.
They may not be, at this time, intending to run another ad campaign like that this year.
If it excludes US accounts and business accounts then it would still signify a slowdown in signups. While I appreciate each new person who converts is harder to reach than the last it would be good to see more of a “reach” goal. Don’t get me wrong, it’s loads of people, but aren’t we expecting further expansion to other countries this year?
I don’t understand this. Their growth is ridiculous given the amount of advertising they do, if we assume that more people is a good thing when I don’t see why money isn’t being spent attracting new customers. I’m baffled. Is it because Monzo have identified that organic growth attracts “stickier” customers? Is it because it’s proving difficult to grow Customer Operations at a rate that doesn’t impact performance? It’s all very sensible, would love to see a little bit more wildness to get that distribution up.
I think it’s probably a mix of both of those along with it being much cheaper to not advertise and wait a little longer to get the customers.
It could also be because they’re prioritising becoming profitable ahead of customer growth, and focusing more resources on that. To do both at once would burn through their cash pile more quickly than they need to. I think developing a profitable model, and using their resources to market that model to existing customers, feels like more of a priority - though of course, they’ll happily take organic growth at the same time.
Why is everyone so obsessed with the number of customers Monzo has - I would much prefer 3 million (salary paying in customers) and Monzo making £3 million profit then Monzo have 10 million customers who only use it as a spending card for their coffee and make a £50 million loss. Plus if it grows too big too fast customer service reps struggle and the service customers receive suffers which then means people switch banks and Monzo effectively causes its own business to fail.
The saying “Revenue is vanity profit is sanity” could be adjusted to “customer numbers is vanity profit is sanity”
There are lots of reasons to want high customer numbers:
1: plenty of economies of scale in this field, maintaining head office functions for a company with 10 million customers isn’t 10x the size of a company with 1 million customers as an example.
2: being a very large company will open doors for partnerships with other large companies
3: large companies tend to be able to negotiate better deals
4: if you like the product, you presumably would like the maximum number of people to benefit from it
5: this is partly a race for good customers. For example Starling have roughly the same amount of money on deposit as Monzo with a much smaller customer base - surely you’d want them to choose Monzo first?
6: I’m an early investor like you, and would like to see a healthy return for all of us. I think each incremental good customer equals a larger exit at some point.
In VC backed companies profit is not the primary number of interest at this stage in Monzo’s growth. The cost of customer acquisition and expected lifetime value are key and the metrics for Monzo at the moment suggest they should be expanding.
I agree with all @andrewpclark’s points. I think it would be worth adding that large numbers of customers also confer credibility and some kind of legitimacy. If someone knows ten people who already use Monzo, they’re more likely to think of opening an account themselves.
I do agree with @Investor_No1, though, that this shouldn’t be a race for more customers above all else. You really want a healthy balance between growth and other forms of improvement - and I think Monzo have got the balance about right.
Could you give me a flavour/range as to how much you have invested. And also how much you expect to yield
#curious
Nice try HMRC!!