“Dear Investors, we gave you plenty of warnings that an investment in Monzo would be illiquid.”
I don’t know how many people are asking for exception permission, but it does appear that it’s a significant degree more than the handful of genuine emergencies that Monzo perhaps expected. That would be my guess for where the delay is - too many requests to deal with gracefully - and that people who did invest sensibly but have now found themselves in exceptional circumstances have been caught out as a result.
tl;dr, Monzo shares are illiquid, everyone was told they were illiquid, everyone was warned about the risks. No-one should be surprised that shares they were told were illiquid turn out to be illiquid.
(ETA: for the avoidance of doubt, I am not and have never been an employee. Views are my own.)
To be fair, whilst I broadly agree. I think it’s perfectly acceptable. People on this forum don’t seem to understand that crowd funding into startups is incredibly risky and that you aren’t, in any way, entitled to get money back because you’re in extraordinary circumstances and didn’t put enough money into a rainy day fund, instead of investing in a startup.
Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, but I feel you are just being Monzo apologists and muddying the water, In order for anyone to actually read this and do anything we need to be clear that Monzo is not meeting its obligations to shareholders and needs to take action.
Imagine you supported Monzo in 2016 and now you are homeless or even dying of a terminal illness or something like that, would you not feel it is completely unacceptable that Crowdcube and Monzo just bounce emails back and forth for months with no intention of actually helping you to liquidate?
Monzo is wrong here and needs to put some of their huge resources into fixing it.
For the record I’m not looking to buy or sell shares so my opinion is purely thinking from a distressed seller’s point of view.
I bought shares privately in 2017 and it was a very easy process, to be honest. They seem to have since added a portaloo’s worth of friction to the process however, and it’s not fair to the distressed sellers.
Fair point - I have no idea what people have given as a reason, but surely if they don’t think the reason is good enough they should reject it rather than bouncing emails back and forth.
It is falling short on professionalism and there is no one owning the problem at Monzo.
Update - heard back from Crowdcube yesterday afternoon saying that Monzo have asked for further information on the exceptional circumstances. To be honest I am not sure how I can provide more information on the reasons I gave and I have a feeling that it will just drag the situation on and on so I am going to spend my time looking at other alternatives.
HOWEVER, I do think Monzo should consider what Revolut did and allow people a one off chance to sell their shares. As Monzo is fully funded at the moment they could even allow a large investor the opportunity to Hoover up shares from small shareholders. Crowdcube could arrange and earn a fee in the process. There must be a lot of people from the first round who have substantial amounts of money tied up in Monzo shares (I have a fair amount myself) and that money could make a real difference to people’s lives.
Totally agree with you, if they had just said No I would have thought “fair enough” and left it there, it was the complete lack of communication that got to me and others.