I was having a discussion with my brother the other day about which bank to go with when it comes to getting a credit card. One of the main points of discussion was how different banks provide different ‘benefits’ for paying your bill on time, as a kind of ‘loyalty’ programme. This either happens in the form of points (Avios, Nectar, etc) or in the form of other benefits.
Obviously Monzo does not offer a credit card system (yet?) but I still wonder if it wouldn’t be a funky idea to have a ‘Monzo Premier’ account tier for high net-worth individuals who get a special coloured card (similar to HSBC Premier) or a ‘Monzo Spender’ account tier which provides benefits of sorts to those who regularly spend money with Monzo as opposed to their other debit or credit cards.
The main advantage of having such a system I feel, would be a mutual benefit situation. Customers are rewarded for their loyalty and continued use of Monzo (something some of my friends have failed to achieve as they end up going back to their ‘big bank’ cards) and the business gains yet another USP on top of the many others it already has. It could become one of the first banks to offer a non ‘screwy’ loyalty or premier membership tier that doesn’t totally alienate some of its customers.
What the rewards or tier requirements could be isn’t really up to me, they would of course have to be realistic for customers to achieve and affordable for the business to run (I guess you look at the customer lifetime value / ROI for each customer / membership).
A ‘beta’ way of testing this idea could be to gamify spending perhaps. For every transaction you make, you gain x points, every time you top up you get x points, everytime to add a receipt and categorise a transaction you get x points, and the list goes on. 50 points makes you a Level 2 Monzoid (name TBC) which you can share with your friends, show off on your profile, and in the future you can get limited rewards as you climb the ranks (special golden card, Monzo shop items, golden tickets, etc).
The benefits / reward schemes that are available through other credit card providers have been discussed recently here -
& here -
but offering rewards to Monzo users if they use the Monzo features like updating transactions categories hasn’t yet
That sort of thing would potentially make sense for Monzo because once it understands user’s spending habits, the app can point out that a user could save x amount on their credit card purchases of holidays (for example) if they used another provider, offer a range of solutions from different providers for the user to choose from & earn a referral fee as a result
Gamification, in the form of the new Targets feature, has already improved my spending habits so I’m a big fan of this idea!
Cheers for linking those other topics Alex, I did try and do a search pre-creating this topic but I didn’t manage to find anything really hinting at what I had in mind. Glad you like the ideas though
@OliverFrenchie Hey Oliver, great to hear your thoughts on this The idea of offering different tiers of accounts isn’t something we’d consider in the short term, it seems at odds with our aim to provide a great product and service for all.
In terms of loyalty programmes, we definitely want to do something like this, focused on retailer funded loyalty and rewards schemes. Looking to the post current account Monzo world, we’d like to support a marketplace platform funded by retailers in exchange for data/access to customers (with customer opt-in of course!).
That sounds very promising… Theres many day to day transactional features I like a lot. I can really see how this ends up being a useful and addictive ‘sticky’ feature of the card.
However the other fact is, my spending patterns and amounts, with a fair chunk of personal long haul travel in there, and LOADS of euro business travel… These aspects are rewarded quite heavily with the right kind of cards. Its quite a lot of benefit to give up, for the more gamified / nice data of Monzo. I am sort of looking at rewards v niceties.
The idea of offering different tiers of accounts isn’t something we’d consider in the short term, it seems at odds with our aim to provide a great product and service for all.