id like to see a Monzo Card looking like this Amazon one
It’s not just car hire firms - raised numbers are useful abroad if you card isn’t accepted by a card terminal - or in other situations where you need to use the older carbon paper method
As far as your carbon footprint goes,
I’m sure a “metal slab” or rather a “very small thin sheet of metal” is really low down the relative impact on the earth. I’d save your energy for diesel engine cars (of which many people upgrade every 4 years), lopping down the amazon, plane journeys and cows. Suppose you dont buy any foil packaged food on a weekly basis? Do you replace your pans every so often? [insert other mental consumable, including phone]. Lets have a sense of relativity when discussing climate and focus effort on the big ticket items rather than getting feisty about something with a v small impact
So I had a bit of a stab at some numbers on the carbon footprint of a metal card vs a plastic one; here
The tl;dr of it is, with some very fuzzy assumptions, a metal card is about 3x more carbon than a plastic one, clocking in at 60g CO2 and 20g CO2 respectively.
If you compare that to, say, driving, a fairly modern car (volvo V40) emits about 140g CO2 in 1 mile of driving… (source: here).
So in the grand scheme… As a consumer - as you say - there are 1,000 other things above and beyond a metal card in terms of impact.
And as for Monzo as an organisation - I would be more concerned with making sure their operation is carbon friendly; things like servers, heating, electricity would have a big impact, and more than likely all of their staff commuting to their offices costs more in carbon than the total of their card production.
And in fact, per this article, sending a new card in the mail has a carbon impact of about 25g… So theoretically if a metal card can last 3x longer you’re saving an additional 60g+ of carbon.
Anyway.
So my originally point was - is the NatWest card thicker? It feels more solid than a Monzo card.
Wouldn’t that cause problems with ATMs if the card was thicker?
Well that’s what I thought but it’s absolutely thicker feeling and less bendy than my Monzo card. The same is true of most of my legacy account cards.
I suppose it’s like metal cards - they will be thicker possibly but still work in ATM’s.
That’s interesting to know. Maybe that 0.1mm makes all the difference in the quality stakes
Is it thicker than the Monzo card including the embossed numbers ?
Yeah - honestly just trying to bend them feels much better quality in the Natwest one.
Or my Amex.
I don’t know why but there is a definite difference between Monzo and legacy cards.
Maybe I’ve missed it but are there any more updates on when the next invites will be sent out?
Might be an obviously answer to this - but could they be made out of a different sort of plastic? Maybe one that is stronger - hence the feeling of it being thicker/ less bendy?
Much more likely.
Either way, I prefer that plastic.
Queue a new thread for “Natwest Plastic Monzo Cards” in 3… 2… 1…
Haha rest assured I won’t be.
But there is something about just slightly improving the quality that could make the branding look a lot better and feel a lot better.
The Monzo standard card has always felt a little thin/bendy/flimsy - It’s not a massive issue when taken in isolation, but when you compare it to a decent card (the Barclays Gemalto cards are a good example), it makes Monzo look and feel a little cheap.
It’s clearly a cost cutting exercise IMO, and it’s hard to argue with that, when so many people won’t care or even notice…
Definitely agree - I think the difficulty might be that as I’ve seen before Monzo have certain distributors/manufacturers that develop their cards (hence some slight differences) so the first port of call I guess would be to centralise that process and have the same card developed everywhere and then look to improve.
But yeah the Monzo card isn’t the best but then again the “best” cards seem to come from packaged/ paid for accounts so I guess that is where some of the payments go to.
Updates on the future of Monzo Plus would be nice also…
I agree. just some rough time lines for certain features would be nice