I blinked a lot to confirm my vision was right and then looked at a calendar to confirm it wasn’t April 1st - and yes, Monzo seems to be hitting the USA in 2018.
I would be very interested to read a blog post about this expansion. What is the reasoning behind Vegas rather than Silicon Valley or NYC? And what will these customer ops staff be doing over there if there are no operations there yet? This sounds fantastic but leaves many questions.
It’s true! We hope to launch in the US as soon as we can.
Regarding ops work - we’ve historically struggled to hire for our overnight ops roles. We’ve had staff who started in those hours and then been unable to maintain them. As a night owl, it’s always been fine for me (those are the shifts I do, and I was among the first in that role - myself, George and Francesco all started on nights in late 2016) but other people find it difficult to balance and have shifted into earlier hours. We have a really great night team as it stands, but hiring has moved at a much slower pace compared to our day team and we aim to fix that.
Having an ops team in the US solves that problem for UK support for now due to the time difference! In fact, I’m here in California myself right now and it’s been amusing to me to see everything happening internally in the night time hours
I’m sure a blog post regarding the location will be forthcoming!
I’ve always thought this is the best way to handle things. It’s what Apple does - support in the US and Ireland. Good on Monzo for using overseas teams where it makes sense (unsociable hours) and also not where it doesn’t (to simply export jobs to countries with cheaper labour).
One thing I do worry as Monzo expands outside the UK is that this will result in staff not familiar with the product from personal usage. Since Monzo isn’t yet available in the US, will you allow those staff to have Monzo accounts to familiarise themselves with the product through personal use?
P.S. I just told a friend of mine in the US who needs a job and would be perfect in many ways for this crossing my fingers for him
You would have more people offering to do those shifts if the salary on offer was decent. However the salary offered will perpetuate youth over experience in the bank as is only reasonable for those new to the world of work or living with family or friends. To attract older customer support staff with families and responsibilities you would need to offer 5,000-10,000 more per annum.
This is true. Also the fact that Monzo is not providing an office for the night team here in the UK may be a factor seriously affecting staff retention. Working from home sounds great but I’m sure it is really difficult for a new starter if they have little internal support and they’re expected to take emergency calls and have video chats with colleagues while their family are asleep in the other rooms, and it’s easy to get bored and sleepy when you don’t have the fear of your boss walking in at any minute. I can see my gf telling me I need to pack it in after about an hour of her trying to sleep with me tapping away at the keyboard and/or talking to people from the other room.
I personally work nights in a bank 1.3 miles from Monzo HQ along with around 100 smart and hard working people (100 night staff next to Monzo!). They have mostly never heard of Monzo so maybe looking for people rather than going to Vegas might solve the cops issue?
On the other hand I see how thinly veiled the UK support reasoning is. Really it is to get a foothold in the US, reward staff with the business trips of a lifetime and create a buzz for the impending launch, am I right?
I think there’s a lot of validity in having a support team working daytime hours it’s better for everyone’s mental and physical health.
That said, clearly there are benefits to picking the US, their next market, over, say, Canada. Where you can also get native English speakers, in the same time zones, and a much nicer country (just my opinion on the last one, of course).
P.S. if it was to reward staff with ‘the business trips of a lifetime’, I think they’d pick somewhere better than Vegas. Low taxes, cheap office space and tons of affordable flights in and out of Vegas might be more realistic reasons for the choice…
Or Australia (not the same time zone, but 9-11 hours difference from the UK, so pretty much ideal)
cough Melbourne (yes, I’m biased)
Yeah, totally makes sense. Google, for example have site reliability teams in Sydney and Dublin (as well as California) so they can have 24 hour coverage with everyone working sociable hours. Maybe New Zealand should move their time zone by 48 hours, then people wouldn’t even have to work weekends…
From the point of view of ‘good mental health’, it makes better sense to recruit in other timezones that to recruit people working unsociable hours. There may be a few people who work overnight because they like to, but I think most doing so are doing it because they HAVE to, which isn’t great.
Maybe it’s just me, but the US is the worst place to offer the ‘trip of a lifetime’ at the moment. It’s become more expensive because Brexit has shafted the £, and the election of Trump has led to an incredibly dodgy travel climate what with the increased persecution of Muslim (or Muslim-appearing) travellers. I, for one, have no intention of visiting the US again until the sitation improves and have already turned down two offers of visiting (and, as New York is one of my favourite places to visit, this isn’t easy).
I couldn’t agree more, and was Vegas ever really the place to offer a ‘trip of a lifetime’ to? Nah, it’s a place with cheap rent, cheap flights and low taxes! It’s a practical business decision, nothing more, nothing less.
Don’t forget LGBT travellers and educated travellers… even before Trump I got some hassle at the US border on multiple occasions, and I’m a US citizen. The worst was once when it was semi-subtly implied that I may be a terrorist because of my employer. I work for one of the world’s top universities…
Good points all. And you’ve reminded me that I also forgot the whole “Hand over your phone and unlock all your social media for us to look at” social media screening policy. Because of that one, if I were to travel, I’d have to burn everything off my phone, claim I don’t use any social media if asked, and risk getting punted straight back to the UK when they don’t believe me.
In fairness, every country has that policy. At least in the US, you can’t go to prison for forgetting your passwords… yet. You can in many countries (including here).
This is one reason options like Chromebooks can be great for businesses. Cheap enough that if they get destroyed, it isn’t a great loss to the business, and they can be wiped before boarding to protect trade secrets, etc… and re-loaded quickly over Wi-Fi once through immigration.
Of course, then you’re just changing who you trust your data with to a cloud service provider… but that’s far too much off-topic for this thread!
(tldr suspected is ordered by court to decrypt hard drive. Says he forgot password. court doesn’t believe him. Holds im in contempt. Imprisoned indefinitely until such time as he complies with court order.)
Of course at the border none of that matters: they’ll just put me on the next flight back home, if they don’t believe I forgot my password…
Not that I find the UK equivalents any good, but for the US I’m especially concerned regarding health insurance, etc… how do the costs of those compare to the UK situation? I’ve always been told health is extremely expensive in the US and a single incident could completely wipe you out financially if you don’t have an insurance policy covering it.
Full-time employers have to (well, did, I don’t know about Trump’s recent changes) provide health benefits.
I’m really interested in the Monzo job in Cardiff, it’d basically be my dream job in many ways, but one has to eat not just dream it would be a massive pay cut for me, but then again, I’m in London now so I do find lots of ways to spend my salary!
As a Las Vegas native, I can confirm that many people can, and do, live on $30k. It’s not a luxurious living, but definitely better than the wages on offer for fast food, Walmart, etc.
Very glad to see Monzo expanding in my hometown! The city has reached 2.1m and is able to better diversify its economy. The Valley needs businesses like Monzo to build out that sector — perhaps poaching a few staff from Zappos, eh?
it’s better for everyone’s mental and physical health.
(yes, I’m biased)