Monzo Partnerships

With some super exciting partnership plans on the horizon (sneak peak below), it makes sense to set up a dedicated ‘partnerships’ thread. Have any ideas for the :monzo: team? Feel free to post your thoughts below.

Head of Partnerships
at Monzo (View all jobs)

We’re looking for someone to build useful partnerships that position Monzo at the heart of our customers’ financial lives.

The data inside a Monzo bank account is extraordinarily valuable. We want to put that data to work for the good of customers, solving the complex and tedious tasks that exist around your bank account.

This might involve helping a customer to get a better deal from their gas or electricity supplier, collecting loyalty points from grocery chains, or submitting a self-assessment tax return to HMRC.

We’re looking for someone to lead the team that builds out these key partnerships, from beginning to end. This will start with deciding the areas of priority, choosing the right partners, striking commercial deals, working to prototype new integrations, trialling them with customers, launching them publicly, and optimising their performance over time.

It’s an exciting role which involves you working directly with a large cross-section of the company, from the exec team to design, engineering, compliance and marketing.

This is a brand-new initiative, so we’re looking for someone who’s not afraid to get hands-on, at least in the early days. You don’t necessarily need a technical or design background, but you should be happy working alongside people with these skills to rapidly prototype new product features. Ideally, you should have been involved in building a new digital product from scratch. As the marketplace grows, you’ll be responsible for hiring and managing your team, and liaising with key strategic partners.

We fundamentally believe that the data belongs to the customer. Monzo is there to help customers manage and share that data, if they choose to do so. Your job is to bring that to life!

Here are some of the things you’ll be working on:

Price Comparison - Monzo is perfectly positioned to tell you if you’re overpaying for your gas, electricity, broadband, mobile phone, car insurance and more. You should be able to switch supplier with a couple of clicks.

Retailer Loyalty, Cashback & Discounts - Carrying around a purse full of retailer branded loyalty cards doesn’t seem like a 21st century solution. What if Monzo automatically accumulated loyalty points from the big grocery chains? Or helped you get every 10th coffee free at your local coffeeshop?

Investments - If you’re lucky enough to have a few thousand pounds sitting in your Monzo account, why not invest it and earn a return? You might want to start a pension, or open a new ISA. Perhaps you’re happy to take more risk for a higher return, and invest in stocks or a P2P lending platform?

Monzo Open API & App Store - Submitting a monthly expense report to your employer is tedious. What if Monzo could automate it by integrating with your company’s accounting software? Or file your annual tax return online with HMRC? These are just two of the thousands of potential apps that people could build on the Monzo API.

Side note: this advert also appears on LinkedIn as posted by Monzo Marketing Inc at 4151 Ashford Dunwoody Rd # 255, Atlanta, Georgia, United States. Seems like some cross wires with Mondo, “a digital marketing and technology staffing solutions agency”? :thinking:

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A few additional ones

Also, just adding this here to tie everything together. They’re partnerships already in development :smiley:

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How is Monzo planning on creating these partnerships? Will it be more of a true price comparison or will they foster special deals with providers for Monzo customers?

Cheers @beningreenjam :+1: Which partnerships would you most like to see?

Another company reportedly working with Monzo is Scrummy (loyalty platform):

@anon4562461 Good question! Hopefully based on the quality of their data/product and benefit to customers.

@SladdinCJ Yes! Thanks for adding Moneybox to this thread.

Coincidentally, I received some promotional material from Barclays yesterday, offering cashback on purchases via barclays.co.uk/cashback (requires bank account login for tracking).

Another interesting partnership is Barclaycard <> Flubit.

Any others you would like to see…?

I’d like to see the ones that would be accessible to most users, therefore giving the biggest potential for growth. That would be in card vending machines and cash deposits in all the major supermarkets, even their local convenience versions, and post offices.

Ah yes, the MoneyBox and Scrummy integrations. I hadn’t forgotten them, just included @bailey’s API Projects thread for simplicity. Everything listed there is already in development or at least waiting for version 1 of the API to be finalise. That said if we want them all listed here too individually there’s

and also

If it came down personal preferences of just one, then I’d like to see 24 hour availability of cash deposits in supermarkets. The reason being is whether we like it or not cash is still an enormous part of our financial lives. Even for those who don’t like dealing with it (myself included) will be given cash by someone from time to time so we’ll need an easily accessible means of depositing that cash.

Monzo are (understandably) keen to banish cash from our financial lives.

Here’s a thread back in March:

But I also agree with your pragmatism.

Until we become a cashless society (hats off to what Denmark, Norway and Sweden are doing) I doubt that’ll be possible to completely ignore the need for cash deposits.

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I had almost abolished cash from my life when living in London but after moving out from London went back to using a lot more cash due to shops not taking cards, having minimum transaction amounts or charges to use cards. If we ever want a cashless society the charges shops get for using terminals do need to be cut

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The UK Cards Association reported that:

  • 78% of all UK retail spending was made via cards.

Some other interesting stats:

  • 49.1 million debit card holders / 31.8 million crebit card holders.

  • Total consumer borrowings: £1.46 trillion. :astonished:

  • 1 out of 8 card payments is contactless.

  • 11% of contactless transactions in the UK are made on TfL network (tube, trains and buses).

  • Average transaction value of cash withdrawals: £69.46.

  • Share of non-cash payments in the UK made using cards:
    ~ 2005 - 46%
    ~ 2015 - 61%
    ~ 2025 - 69%

http://www.theukcardsassociation.org.uk/wm_documents/UK%20Card%20Payment%20Summary%202016%20FINAL.pdf

Honestly, these merchants with minimum card charges that customers run into normally don’t understand their own business enough to know that they need a different contract with a terminal provider and acquirer or that they need to reconsider their margins/pricing.

If a business regularly takes sub-£10 payments then it makes no sense to pay a static price plus a low percentage because they would be paying more per transaction than a maybe very slightly higher percentage with no static per-transaction charge. Unfortunately, instead of resolving that, they have somehow decided it’s better to just not take card payments under that threshold at all.

Minimum card charges make no sense given today’s landscape of terminals and acquirers. Charges to use cards are even worse, build that in to the margins or base price.

/rant :rage:

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I wouldn’t say it true of all businesses, big or small but particularly smaller stores. In fact all in my area charge a flat 50p per card transaction below £5. Still ludicrous in today’s world and needs to be abolished.

Recently I found myself in those shops looking for extra things I don’t necessarily need or a treat for my partner/housemates to take me over £5 threshold.

Cuvva is very keen to integrate into Monzo’s marketplace. We offer motor insurance - currently enabling you to get insured per-hour on a friend’s car, but we’re about to release a continuous product to cover your own car. I think that’s the one which would make sense on Monzo as it does compete with the traditional annual products.

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Cuvva’s new insurance product looks really interesting - Id definitely be looking at it( if I still had a car!)

Is that Cuvva flexi? My insurance is due next month. Worth me requesting an invite?

That’s right. Just message us in-app and I’ll add you to the list :slight_smile:

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If I’d made the connection last Thursday I’d have asked you about it then. Assuming I haven’t mixed up James’

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Yeah I’m the same one from the user testing :slight_smile:

Plum offer a very similar savings assistant service to Chip but it operates exclusively through Facebook chat for now.

I’ve found it helpful and emotionally rewarding for the last few months, its learns my spending patters and saves amounts that I don’t even notice - but are adding up to a nice, comforting pot now.

Also, I just got an email from Tandem saying they are now looking to release a savings product in the near future while they wait to sort out some issues with their financing.

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In case anyone’s curious to know more about the new(ish) Head of Partnerships @philhewinson here’s a summary of his background (he used to do this for Facebook :eyes:) -

http://tech.newstatesman.com/news/monzo-phil-hewinson-hire

One of the first partnership tests set to be rolled out in the coming weeks is with Bulb, a renewable energy startup, Hewinson reveals.

“We’ll probably start by testing it with 200 people,” he says. “Then based on the results and the value people are getting, we may scale it to a couple of thousand, then see where it goes.”

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Is there still a ‘Head of partnerships’ position at Monzo? Curious to know why all the retailer, cashback and discount services seems to have died and to my knowledge never been mentioned since :slight_smile:

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