Monzo Plus has completely changed how I see Monzo

UK Monzo Chat Monzo Plus
21

yes Starling seems to be using the same sort of metrics …maybe ??? … “active users” = paying in £1000+ / month , it is presumably an industry standard ??? although without the context of daily, weekly or monthly doesnt mean a lot

I also thought there were classifications of DAU, WAU, and MAU - Daily, weekly and monthly active users …presumably a DAU makes a certain amount , maybe only one payment a day , the plot thickens on statistics

however I dont quite understand 32% of active users should it not be 32% of our customers are active users ? or is it 32% of DAUs / WAUs / MAUs pay in at least £1000 a month ? which isn’t the same

from… Starling letter from our CEO 2019 -

“People often ask us how many customers pay their salaries into their Starling accounts. For our personal account customers, 32% of active users deposit at least £1,000 into their account per month. Among customers who have been with us for two years, the figure is 41%. For business accounts, 61% of active users deposit at least £1,000 a month.”

Im risking going off topic again as the conversation progresses …sorry - maybe this should go in to Starling discussion …

22

Of course not, but i would expect to be informed of whats being worked on or how theyve taken the feedback for a paid product.

Some people on the forums mentioned about cancelling if it stays as it is, weve heard nothing either way if that will be the case. Will offers change? Add new external providers? no idea.

To you perhaps, ive had my girlfriend and a few friends personally ask me if their money is safe with monzo due to the “bad press” you mentioned.

No matter how good the reassurances are from me, one from the bank itself will always be better received.

Unless you sit on this forum everyday the only news out there about monzo is negative.

If incorrect to me for no reason then will surely be incorrect to others so point stands

I personally dont like the patronising feel of “are you sure you want to contact us, is it urgent message” comes across. And its not 24/7, i message now i need to wait an hour or two.

Phonelines non existent any time ive tried.

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23

It’s one month in. If this is the stage in 6 weeks then fair enough. The second anything is mentioned on here as “Soon” then people expect it to be in their app tomorrow.

It’s very niche news about the problems. The report stands by itself and people can/are reading what they want into it.

Monzo coming out and saying “We’re fine, don’t panic” isn’t going to make it to BBC news, so the friends that are asking you are unlikely to see that either.

You think it’s incorrect. But you don’t know the full lending criteria. So it’s not wrong, it’s just that you don’t agree with it.

The wait time does need to improve but it is 24/7. Having to wait doesn’t mean it isn’t.

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24

I’d be interested to know why you expect this. Surely one signs up for a service or buys a product based on the value that it offers at that moment, rather than on unknown (and in the case of Monzo Plus, unpromised) future functionality?

Just because I buy an iPhone today doesn’t mean that I expect to be kept informed of iOS 15 development.

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25

You’d think so, wouldn’t you. But you only have to read this forum for what happened after the aborted attempts at packaged accounts. So many people signing up on an expectation that never came to fruition.

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I think that was a lot to do with …was it Jonas that came on and said this is what we hope to be offering , people then signed up on those hopes , rightly or wrongly , expecting it to happen , it didnt , people were miffed … rightly or wrongly - a whole thread about that … now Monzo dont say anything about what more they want to offer , people are miffed because there are no updates , they cant win …

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27

They can roll out updates and improvements at a steady pace, and probably get away with minimal announcements of what’s coming while keeping people happy.

Starling appears to be following this approach fairly well, though it probably won’t suit those who enjoyed Monzo’s previously extremely transparent way of working.

Personally, I’ve observed Monzo has been operating on a cycle of big development and build up, and then nothing while they work on the next thing. This has left many half completed / minimal features, which I don’t think they can get away with when they’re charging for the product as with Plus.

However, there may well be a plan to make constant small but steady improvements to Plus to keep the product fresh and avoiding it looking like another thing ‘done’ that Monzo is moving on to the next thing from. We just don’t know at this point, especially as there is a lot of change within Monzo right now.

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28

" However, there may well be a plan " lol I hope so

I think Starling made a good decision to close their community forum that stopped most of the why aren’t you doing this this or this, why have you not done this by such and such a date , why have you frozen my account type posts etc …they took away the stick with the move

I also think they ditched a good resource for feedback which they then had to resort to twitter to garner feedback from

Im now probably going off topic again by answering your post regarding Starling :slight_smile: on a monzo plus thread

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29

Just to use your own point the reason i buy an iphone is because i know the ios is being iterated on, sure its great at the moment but i buy with the confidence that i get future updates to my ios and itll feel like a new phone every year with sw updates.

Currently im on the fence to buying plus just because of how bad the old plus was in terms of promises for additional updates.

I know my legacy bank isnt supported so ill wait until i know more about them being supported even though their api is available. I have no idea when or if this will even be.

Offers, we have no indication it this is a one time thing or newer parters will be added or at what stage.

I guess i maybe rightly or wrongly see this launched version of plus in beta because there are so many gaps and as much as i want to get plus i cant until i see these gaps being plugged or at least being intended to be plugged.

Agreed, a month isnt a long time but weve had no indication that well get an update from a staff member about plus. Was just a drop and ignore after launch day

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30

There was a turning point, not just to do with Plus, but in general, where the vibe I got was that as many staff talking to customers as much as possible went from being actively encouraged to being seen as a risk of some kind. Radical transparency, which had been a core tenet, and something I very much believe in, felt like it was being left behind.

It was weird to me, because at the same time there were very obvious wins that we had continued to get by doing just that - Bruno’s engagement around the app redesign as one example, the team that built Bills Pots actively used many comments on here to show the demand for it. But I think perhaps the failure of the initial Plus launch and the Watchdog thing contributed to it.

I’m not bitter about it - it’s what helped me come to the realisation that I myself had gone from being considered a great example of the culture to no longer being representative of it in what I personally believed in, and I wouldn’t be anywhere near as happy as I am right now if I had stayed any longer. And that’s totally fine, because cultures change, people change and times change.

But I think what you’re seeing now with the amount of people leaving, and more specifically the specific people who have chosen to leave recently, is indicative of a cultural shift, and it’s probably going to be jarring for most people here who have been here a long time and who aligned with the way the company used to be.

That seems to me to be the crux of this entire thread. Monzo changed, and maybe it had to change to survive. New customers sign up every day and the culture that exists now will draw them in.

So the answer is simply to adjust one’s expectations. There’s still great people at the company doing amazing things. And as a user I still find the overall experience preferable to other banks.

But Monzo isn’t a startup anymore, and the more we expect it to act like one, as it used to, the more likely we are as longtime customers to be disappointed when that doesn’t happen.

I think Plus is a great product, and I’ve been happy to have been using it since January. Is it in line with all the things we said and did in 2015, 2016, 2017? Perhaps it isn’t, but that’s the reality and the cost of doing business when you’ve gone from an unknown player to millions of users and frequent media attention.

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31

Absolutely this. I’m surprised Monzo hasn’t shut this one down yet. I suppose it can’t be a distraction if you ignore it, Monzo? :grimacing:

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32

I dont think they ignore it , its all very well for staff to spend sometimes their own personal time to come on an engage with the community if the community plays nicely , and Im not talking about having to always praise the staff or offering constructive criticism , Im talking about this is “crap” your product is “shite” , Monzo is a joke , your hard work in producing something is “rubbish”
from anonymous posters , who think that sort of “feedback” is good fun, and their language is appropriate , Im not surprised staff start thinking to themselves …do I want to engage in what can be at times quite a toxic place

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33

I’m not surprised by this at all.

If a member of staff posts on here they get harassed most of the time.

Staff members have posted to help and then been criticised by it, then criticised for silence.

Kierans tweet about the open banking infrastructure lead to a thread and hundreds of posts wanting answers, where is it, where’s the update etc etc. Next time will he be so keen to share in advance? Maybe not.

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35

Well no, because he’s left Monzo

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36

Id argue the opposite, this is the exact sort of thing that happened all the time in the past and the forum was a general good place to be around.

I think theres a massive difference between visible anticipation and demanding for something and i think the forum members get it right most of the time treading between the two

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37

Just to be clear, when I said risk I didn’t mean “risk of the staff member getting harassed” - that’s part of the job of any community team to handle that.

I meant risk as in there being a shift towards specifically not wanting to share things with the community in many instances. This being the point where the concept of radical transparency was no longer imbued in the DNA of many people in the company, or they didn’t feel it was valuable.

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39

This :arrow_up:

I think there are two reasons why I don’t see this happening as it might have. One is that last time, the feedback was overwhelming negative (and some of it personally so) - while I agree that the feedback was fair at a product level, developers are humans too and unsurprisingly may not feel like they want to engage only to have some virilant feedback which was not all constructive.

But the main reason this is unlikely, in my opinion, is that Monzo are not a startup anymore, and this forum is a very small representation of their customer base. I personally think that while I would like to see a public roadmap, I also know as a Product Owner just how hard it is to keep that up to date, while also working on the internal development one too. So I can understand why Monzo may not do this, it requires time and resource to keep it in any way relevant or informative.

Also, we are one month in to a major product release with a significant customer base, I suspect Monzo is still doing a lot of initial data analysis and is still identifying trends etc, meaning it’s probably unlikely they have enough clear data to determine what should happen next. I’d be very suprised if they were at that juncture yet to be honest.

So I suspect it’s a case of yes there will (and should) be feedback, but just not yet…

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40

Totally this, Monzo can’t cater to early adopters forever or else they’d never make any money.

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41

Just so we are clear I still think early adopters/this forum has a place, just it’s part of a much wider picture

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42

As a product owner surely you understand why this was the case? If you drop something out of the blue once its finished with very little/ if any? public testing and then disappear then you have to be open to some negative feedback.

This forum isnt just full of just early adopters anymore, many of the people i used to enjoy reading inputs from have long gone and alot of the most active accounts on here have been made within the last year.

Look at brunos thread on the new nav, continuous constructive feedback which helped mould one of the key components of the app.

It just feels like the fear of bad press and the want to hold cards close to the chest is whats causing monzo to make more mistakes than triumphs.

this is perhaps the only saving grace, if i can come back in another month and still feel underwhelmed then i personally think ill even give up bothering to come on the forum

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