The first time you use FD it almost feels like you’ve misdialed.
“Please type 1 for…” Nope.
“If you’re call is about banking, please say…” Nope.
You just get a hello by an actual person. And quite quickly. It must be mind-bendingly expensive.
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The same for chat too. It “tries” to offer self serve but almost immediately defers to a real human who is actually real time. And quite effective.
Had Plus since relaunch (was on old Plus too). Not upgraded to premium as the only thing would be the metal card but I use Google Pay for physical payments mostly.
I think some of the Plus features should be free to all (custom categories, other accounts, and Google Export [which needs improving to work with newer features]) but I do feel that some of the features are worth paying for. Virtual cards being one, especially since there is only a finite number of card numbers available. Credit score is a paid feature? I can get that for free via NatWest or via mulitple other sites. Connected accounts should also be free… I can see my Monzo account and transactions in the NatWest app, but not the other way round unless I pay.
I agree that the offers need to be refreshed, with better offers available for Premium. They should be refreshed on a semi-regular basis.
I don’t agree with those saying that interest should be free for all, since that’s what the savings accounts are for, but for those who have Plus or Premium, the interest needs to be increased and more in-line with the Bank of England rate. Possibly giving a small boost for Premium.
Cashback on purchases or Direct Debit payments (which I get with NatWest) would also be the icing on the cake.
I love Flex for those more expensive purchases and feel like it works in place of a credit card but maybe Plus/Premium should get better interest rates and/or longer repayment terms. Maybe even offer them the “6 months interest free” as standard that was offered during the run up to Christmas. You can still limit it to 2 transactions at a time. If you pay it early you get a 6 month interest free slot back.
My NatWest packaged account cost is £20 (but I get £5 back) and gives me breakdown cover, phone insurance, travel insurance and a tastecard (amongst other things that I don’t use). I imagine giving those to Plus members wouldn’t be viable but it would certainly make Premium more attractive. You could even off-set some of the cost of the metal card by charging a small “sign up” fee if people wanted the metal card aswell. (£10 on top of the first month).
I would happily close the NatWest account and pay £15-£20 for Monzo Premium if phone and travel insurance, plus breakdown cover was included, regardless of metal card (as long as the insurances and breakdown were decent offerings).
While I don’t have a joint account, I can imagine the frustration with having the current Plus perks for your personal account but not on your joint account. I dont think that having Plus on one of the personal accounts should automatically qualify the joint the account. While a little complicated this could work:
- At least 1 of the personal accounts has Premium, so joint gets Plus (upgrade to Premium available)
- Both personal accounts have Plus, so joint gets Plus (upgrade to Premium available)
- If only 1, or neither of the personal accounts have Plus, then joint can sign up to Plus/Premium (perks do not filter to personal).
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Okay, I’m on to Tech Innovation. Which, in hindsight, feels like a rather overblown title for software features. But I digress.
The way I’ve looked at these is that they are either significant investments that need the Premium/Plus revenue to pump prime, or smaller nice-to-haves that there wouldn’t be a business case for in the free product. In that context, I’d see Premium as an incubator for them: keep them in the paid tier for a year or two, then assess moving them to the free account. Then build a bunch more.
As before, I know that these are not all affordable, certainly not all together.
Deep breath. Go:
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Save bank statements to Google Docs. I save mine to Google Docs. It’d be excellent to have them exported automatically.
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Rehabilitate the Google Sheets export. It needs to cover Pots, Flex and main account. And throw in connected accounts. Basically make it robust and keep it updated. When you’re offering a premium product it’s important to make sure it just all works. A bit like the poor interest levels it really needs to be killed (don’t do this) or cured (do this).
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Upload old accounts data so you can see it in Monzo / Terms. QIF is a common format. Specify a CSV one, too.
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Here’s a biggie: Rules and Money Routing. On a trigger (like salary in) carry out certain actions (like moving money to pots, external accounts etc). But also other actions, like automatically adding tags to certain transactions, making notes etc. Basically, I’d like https://flowyour.money/. I would pay for Plus just for this.
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Arguably not Premium specific, but please lift the artificial limit for number of pots and custom categories. If it’s a design issue then find a better design. And can I have all my categories (standard and custom) in one list, please?
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Again, perhaps a general thing, but I need to set a category against a pot. That means that everything that goes in and out that pot would have that category by default.
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For the love of everything Monzo, please let me add PDF receipts. I get so many in my inbox that I have to screenshot to add. That is suboptimal.
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Speaking of which, can you scrape inboxes for receipts and automatically add them? @sherlock produced something to do just that. Perhaps you could buy/license it from him?
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Let me add my future standing orders/direct debits to my calendar. So I can see what’s coming up.
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Similarly, publishing a Monzo calendar that i can hook into with my calendaring app that shows transactions by day and the closing balance would be cool.
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I’d like to see Monzo get involved with variable recurring payments (a new part of the open banking spec). That could help execute the money routing dream, but also to create a salary sorter for external accounts and to sweep the contents of pots / accounts to a specified location.
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I want Monzo to connect to HMRC. There are APIs available and I’d like to see it used to add a payslip to my salary. And for a separate section in Trends which would plot my net and gross income over time, showing how much tax I’ve paid, my annual salary inflation/increase rate etc. In time I’d like to be able to submit my self assessment tax return through Monzo. I’d pay (a bit) extra for this. Especially if it came with an accountant to check things over
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I want Monzo to** record and monitor my bills**. This could be hooking into the Octopus API, or by scraping bills from emails / online portals. There used to be a nice service called OneDox that did something similar but it couldn’t make money. In Monzo, I’d like to see things in Trends like my energy/water etc use over time, then the price per unit, then total cost to me. Comparators with average households would be cool. Trends would make this data come alive. There’s also a possible profit line here from brokering switches.
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Similarly, please hook into a house prices API (Zoopla offers one). Do something funky so I can see the equity in the property by aggregating the data with the connected mortgage information.
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For the love of 'zo, let me pay you for manual accounts, automatic salary sorter and automatic get paid early. It’s painful to watch a blue circle beg.
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And finally, use all of this info to give me a) a net worth figure with some lovely graphs over time in Trends showing assets vs debts and liquid vs illiquid assets; and b) a way of modelling future spend.
That’s enough to be getting on with. Make (some of it) so please. 
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Or Option D - don’t force us to pay 2 fees and just support it natively. Even if at a slight premium.
I saw this on another topic:
This really needs to be free (or significantly reduced) for Premium customers.
It’s making me (only slightly irrationally) angry that it’s not.
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Right, last bit: partnerships and bundled services.
When I wrote my first post, I had these as conceptually different in my head. Partnerships being with other financial services / fintech firms to offer a rounded service. Something like one fee that gave you Freetrade Plus and Monzo Premium. But, Freetrade aside, I can’t really think of anyone that I’d be interested in. And it’s looking like Freetrade will become a competitor, so that’s out. I’d be interested in a partnership to access the bond market via Wisealpha, but that doesn’t make sense to make Premium exclusive.
In the future, though, I’d like to see Monzo make much more of its API and effectively create a marketplace of extensions and add-on apps. Das Budget is a good example of that - having a free subscription to that as part of Premium would be ace. But I’d also like other stuff to cater for niches that Monzo shouldn’t put in the main app. Get some hack days going, work on a better OAuth (think Google login) way of authenticating for individual apps, heck even create a market place where they’re vetted and Monzo takes a cut. Then offer the cream of the crop via Premium for free.
So on to bundled services. I’ve said before that, where there’s a hand-off (like to insurance), I’d like deep integrations via APIs and seeing them natively in the Monzo app. But some of them are just thinks that you get with Monzo, or are billed once via Premium, that need their own app. Again, these won’t all be affordable, but the types of thing I’d like to see are:
- Different tiers of phone insurance - with Apple or Samsung directly, say.
- With the Assurant insurance, I’d want a higher max claim limit per year - and a lower excess.
- Purchase protection, a bit like you get on Revolut
- Spotify or Netflix subs (like you get on Vodafone Red)
- Find some digital-native insurance start-ups that are built on APIs and deeply integrate them. Phone/gadget and travel please.
- Transport-related bundles are always difficult. If you do offer one, make it one that you can pick from. So give me either a) an interest-free season ticket loan for a year, b) cycle insurance, or c) car recovery insurance. That way all bases are covered.
Finally, for cards, give Premium users the choice to pick from any tier available - i.e. a holo Plus one, a standard hot coral one, a hot-coral-on-white one, or an unembossed hot coral one. Offer a wider range of physical cards that non-Premium members can purchase (for pots) and throw in a couple free every year for Premium members. Oh and offer each colour with a small range of icons/emojis that can be printed on and which can be added to Google/Apple Pay, too.
Fundamentally, I just want to feel like I’m being looked after, that Premium is value for money and that Monzo isn’t taking the mickey. I worry that the balance is about to pivot to the wrong side of the scales for all of them at the moment.
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Absoflippinlutely
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I promise I’ll shut up shortly. But a couple of other thoughts:
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Things like credit tracker feel tacked on. Arguably it should be in the free tier, but whenever it sits it needs to be better integrated. I’m thinking adding it to Trends, seeing how your score evolves over time, then doing some funky things like tracking total debt over time, total debt available, number of accounts. Think out of the box and present the information in a very different and innovative way.
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More fundamentally, transfer limits need a look at. Monzo is bottom of the pile. It’s never really been a problem for me, but I’m now finding that I’m getting close to the £10k limit if I want to move money between savings providers. If it’s a risk-based decision, work out what makes Monzo more risky than competitors. But Premium is a good place to start to raise the limit, because you’re limiting risk to folk that are engaged with Monzo and likely to be using it as their main back account - and the numbers are much lower, of course.
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Agree Credit Tracker should be on the free tier. You can get the same service from NatWest/RBS and Lloyds to name a few.
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I think the same argument used for connected accounts (that it actually gives you more insights than elsewhere) could perhaps be made for it if they radically rethought the interface.
At the moment it’s hidden in the Tab of Death Plus tab and manages to not do anything better than the CRA apps. A first principles rethink of what to do with the data, and integration into Trends, would be perfect I think.
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NatWest/RBS also do a ‘credit score predictor’ based on different types of changes to your file (such as apply for different types of credit or moving address). Gives an insight that some might find helpful.
Insert comments about there being no such thing as a ‘credit score’ 
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Working with Joint Accounts is my ask, without this then I have no use for the paid account variants. I would sign up for one in a flash if Joint Accounts were supported.
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What extra do we want for the money?
Club Lloyds is a good example of this I think. Offering partner discounts on retailers people actually use. Also the gift per year being a cinema ticket creates the Meerkat/Orange Wednesdays appeal. While the fee is waived if you pay enough into the account.
I would add to Premium:
- RAC / AA breakdown cover
- Cashback based on overall customers most used retailers
- A selection of free gifts per year i.e. one coffee from Costa 6 times a year, 6 cinema tickets, magazines
- Move offers to the Premium and link with retailers customers will use more
- Unlimited free PayPoint deposits
- Coloured/engravings on metal card
- More than £5 if you refer a friend
PS now you’ve got the mortgage tracker, a rent tracker that links to credit score (like Rent Ladder) would be nice!
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I’m just looking at Vitality health insurance and have seen they do some interesting things. A free Nero coffee a week, free Amazon Prime (which in turn gives you free Deliveroo) etc etc.
And then there’s O2 Rewards which are kinda cool. Lots of coffee in there, too.
Flipping it on its head, I wonder if Monzo could reach a deal for free Premium with a particular mobile phone company or insurance provider?
(I’m not sure that that’s desirable but just throwing ideas around).
But one thing: I don’t want to have to activate any offers. I just want to spend with my Monzo card and have them happen automatically!
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Late response but as I was drifting off I thought… how about a PAYU (pay as you use) model rather than a flat fee. So you pay the base rate £5 for Plus, and then there’s ‘add-ons’ for example, mobile phone insurance, breakdown cover, travel insurance & other exciting things
If you buy 2 or more add-ons you become a Premium customer with an exclusive metal card
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They did try the bolt on approach, but the reality of economises of scale slapped them in the face
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I have this, get 50% off my Pure Gym and the perks mentioned + knowing I can actually see a GP within 100 years.
Be aware you do need to keep active for the perks especially Amazon as that is max points per month or they charge £7.99 for it, but you get 5 for going to the gym and then 7.5K steps, and you have maxed your points for the day (max 8 per day, 40 per week). I go 5 runs a week so hit the target without even counting the gym.
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I think this is where Monzo really needs to review the options for offers at the different tiers. For example, having a free six months of Apple Music was a really nice thing to find with Barclays.
Though the HSBC offers are a little “international” regularly changing offers, for example “this month get a free coffee at X” could be a really nice thing to get with Monzo Premium vs the “bolt-on” insurance which we know doesn’t scale/
And I agree, the offers should be in app and readily usable. I think Natwest is good as an example of how to do this well.
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Do you have to think about NatWest offers in advance or can you just use your card and automatically get them?