Hi everyone, Benji (the Product Manager for Monzo Plus) here. I wanted to give you an update on what’s going on with Plus, address some of your main areas of feedback, and - most importantly - apologise.
First up: we’re sorry.
We know that the experience you’ve had with Monzo Plus so far doesn’t match the original vision we set out. Plus has always been an evolving project, but we should have kept you way more in the loop about what was changing and why.
We’re really grateful to everyone’s who’s signed up to Plus so far, especially our early bird adopters. Your ideas and feedback haven’t always been easy reading, but they are helping us to work towards a better product.
We’ve done a poor job of communicating with our existing customers and everyone here on the forum about this for which I’m really sorry. We need to do better and will do better.
How we got here and what’s next for Plus
We launched Plus with full customisation, so you could pick features individually. We learnt this was a mistake because it added too much complexity.
When we ran user testing to gather feedback on Monzo Plus, many users found it confusing and overwhelming. Our team had to step in to clarify what was going on at several stages, meaning that the product and its design weren’t clear enough.
Many customers were also unsure about how much they’d be paying each month by the time they’d got to the end of the sign-up process. We found that it was especially unclear that custom features cost more than the flat fee for Core features.
We’re now relaunching Plus without Core or individual custom features. Instead we’re combining multiple features in specific bundles to make everything simpler. It should also be clearer how much you’ll be paying each month, and what’s included. We don’t know if these are the correct bundles yet, but we’re going to spend the next few weeks working this out with new Plus customers.
Once we’re confident in the new bundles, you’ll have three options:
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Switch to the bundles with comparable features to what you have today at the same price or less than you’re paying today.
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Keep your existing bundle exactly as it is.
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Cancel your Plus subscription, no questions asked.
We haven’t built all this yet, but it’ll be ready within a month. We’ll message you when you can choose what you’d like to do.
Swag
We know this was unclear because we only gave out swag at our in-person events in London.
Everyone who opts into the new Supporter bundle is guaranteed swag sent to them in the post. And there’s a new Monzo Plus tee design on the way.
Card quality
We hear your complaints about the quality of the card, specifically the card not looking as it should, CVVs being visible, and colours running or smudging, and it’s one of the main points of feedback internally too. We’re working on a few solutions including looking at new suppliers and doing more manual QA of our current cards.
Interest on your balance
As we said in the blog post, we’re removing interest on balances for now. If you’ve got it at the moment - and choose to keep your current package - we won’t take it away from you. We might test it again in the future and will share the results of that if we do.
Lounges
We’re still planning to bring airport lounge access to Monzo Plus this September. We won’t increase the price of the Traveller bundle (£9 a month) when we do this.
Metal cards
At the moment, nobody has a metal Monzo card. Metal cards are extremely expensive to produce, and we’re still exploring what kind of prices are fair.
We hope to have the metal card ready in September or later. But we’ll keep you updated if that changes.
Again, we’re sorry that we couldn’t make the original vision of Monzo Plus work. But we think bundles are the right direction and offer good value. As always we’ll keep an eye on the numbers, as well as your feedback. If they’re not right, we will continue working hard to make this work. And we’ll keep you in the loop (much better than before) as things change.
Thank you for all of your commitment. I really hope we can make this right going forward