Youāre only as secure as your weakest point. Your front door can be made of a material impenetrable to man but if you give your friends a set of keys and they leave those keys in a restaurant, your house is compromised. The same is true of personal information: the problem is not you, the problem is everybody that you give your personal information to. Every time you provide your credit card details to a website you are introducing another opportunity for your details to be compromised. You might guard your card details with your life, but examplestore.com might accidentally publish them in a publicly accessible datastore because their junior developer didnāt realise that their database is public by default.
Common wisdom around the security of personal information is wrong, especially passwords. A password with a lot of complexity is not a good password[1], a good password is a password that only provides access to one thing. You can have the most complex password in the world but if you give that password to 10 websites, your account on all 10 websites is exposed if just one of those websites is compromised.
Most people have a vision of a hacker as someone who picks you out of a line up and then devotes their resources to hacking you as an individual but that isnāt what happens in reality. In reality, the absolute majority of compromises happen because a repository of personal information is compromised (such as a website) and then every piece of that personal information is used to compromise other services for financial gain. Anti-virus software is important but it does not protect you from the type of financial fraud you are most likely to be a victim to.
Virtual cards allow you to drastically reduce your exposure to a website being compromised: if examplestore.com is compromised and your virtual card details are stolen you can immediately kill that card alone and your money is no longer at risk and youāre not inconvenienced by waiting for a brand new card to be sent out to you. They have other benefits too, such as preventing unwanted renewal of subscriptions and limits on total expenditure. You can look at privacy.com for an example of a mature product in the space to better understand their value proposition.
Modern day personal information security requires that you assume by default your information will be compromised and you structure passwords, payments etc. to best survive compromise. A single point of failure (one card used everywhere, one password used everywhere) is a recipe for disaster.
[1] A password should be reasonably complex but my name is neil used on one website is a better password than DJPZ%%Iv0Lc)J^1UaT9)(vĀ£s2FxKodtR used on 20 websites.
Just out of interest is your target group for this the younger age range? With only offering single phone insurance and content insurance it doesnāt seem like youāre targeting the older age group that are more likely to own their house and have a family so more phones would have to be covered?
Virtual debit card, an account number and ability to assign direct debits to pots would be like ultimate toolkit to have monzo as single money hub, bills and categories from set pots, would be like budgeting maxed out.
I just want to pick up on this point. Some websites are starting to use shady techniques to sign you up to subscriptions you did not ask for or want. They will usually refund you no questions asked (because if they did not, their chargeback ratio would skyrocket) - but a single use card takes away the worry.
For me, the nationwide insurance ticks all my essential boxes with family worldwide travel insurance, family mobile phone insurance at a crazy good price, monzo will have to go some to beat this.
Also the UK car breakdown cover (with green flag I think), which I donāt really need but itās nice that itās there and I think even if that was not included it would still be a stonking deal.
I would if included in the base package and if done like Revolut, pay for a virtual disposable card feature; I was very tempted to join Premium just for that feature.
All the horror stories of Revolutās work conditions and the hassle of many errors happening with my Revolut account, including at sign up having no account and sort code details at all, a card arriving that contactless would not work on and finally having no one available that could help when I couldnāt buy and order an extra permanent virtual MasterCard as the button to confirm wouldnāt workā¦ So I requested the account be shut, rather than attempt to sign up to Premium and find something else broken.
Hereās hoping that this or similar is how Monzo envision the virtual card feature.
I use a password generator(One time pad) on every website I enter so every password is different and hard to break. This technically wouldnāt stop certain attacks, but these arenāt relevant here.
GDPR should make this less likely to occur. I do agree that most breaches are due to poor data handling and poor implementation of salting and other cryptography techniques and are outside any of our control.
This is interesting a cool and didnāt know it existed.
But overall, you make some extremely well thought out and valid points
One thing Iām not so sure about is interest. Hereās the reason previously given for not offering it:
Have the views on the importance of it changed? Iād still say that theyāre valid.
Also, it seems like one of the following must be true:
Itās fairly inexpensive for you to offer once implemented, in which case, it should be made available to everyone.
Providing interest is costly, so the price of Monzo Plus would need to be increased to account for that. Weād basically be paying for the interest in the cost of Monzo Plus and that seems pointless.
I completely agree that a virtual card is something that should be offered to everyone if the facility exists - itās a security feature after all.
As also said before, I appreciate there may be additional costs for this feature but itās something that a number of banks have offered for many years. I canāt remember who I was banking with roughly 15 years ago but they offered it as standard without limitation; maybe it was something like Smile or Cahootā¦
I really like the airport lounges being linked - but what lounges are these? In my experience, the majority are worth the money but some are definitely better than others. If the likes of OneWorld or something similar is on offer then I will definitely be signing up.
This leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. An end date should have been specified or at least tell us that it was limited. Itās basically a lottery isnāt it? Maybe I missed something or this could have been made much clearer. Iāve been willing to sign up since the day the post went up and have been on the wait list since then and I may not get āearly birdā pricing. Add that to it not working on Android for a while and this seems a little harsh.
Aside from that, Iām actually looking forward to Monzo Plus. Iāll definitely be signing up for phone insurance but I also wish that breakdown cover was available. Maybe one for the future?
I expect itās LoungeKey. Personally, I consider LoungeKey to be second to Priority Pass but it has reasonable lounge availability at this price point: https://airport.mastercard.com/
It wonāt be airline lounges (OneWorld) - it will be the likes of Aspire, Escape etc.
tobyadams
(#fullmonzo joint account since Aug18)
64
+1 to this approach, thus incentivising using savings products, better for monzo (if savings account with them) and encourages better financial habits.
So I requested the account be shut, rather than attempt to sign up to Premium and find something else broken. 
