Great overview. Definitely agree around the future proofing.
An example dashboard or library of dashboards would be neat and probably help a lot of people see the value in having the live data export. That said, I fear its a recipe for endless troubleshooting of users’ sheets. The problem is that there is no one size fits all with presenting financial data. They could probably just keep it to the basics and show account and pot balances over time. But people will ask for more and you can’t show much more without it being unsuitable for some amount of the user base (due to monthly versus 4 weekly pay cycles). I would rather Monzo spend that dev time improving the in app analytics (as you’ve suggested).
I think ^this summarises it really well. I use my sheets dashboards to give me a sense of my financial trajectory and to highlight problem areas that I can address to improve that trajectory. The app currently does an ok job at highlight areas of overspending using the budgeting tools, but it definitely doesn’t give me any clue as to whether I’m better off today than I was 3 months ago, or this time last year. The lack of historic balance data in app is at the root of this problem I think.
I wonder whether the lack of a sense of financial ‘story’ or ‘journey’ in app was a strategic choice. I guess you could argue that “You are £8,203 worse off than this time last year” is not a great notification to receive and may do more harm than good.
Side note: This thread from earlier this year provides a little bit of context for the groundwork that I likely led the way to having live exports: CSV Exports