Monzo Staff Weekly Q&A - Annual Report Edition!


Note : All Monzo Q&As to date can be found here :grinning:


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Forum Crew!

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It’s officially July! Love is in the air. And pollen. My god, so much pollen. It’s not super fun for those of us with the fever of hay. Stock up on those tablets, folks.

You might have noticed a few headlines floating about to do with our Annual Report.
We published it today, go and read it if you haven’t already! It’s interesting stuff.

So with that done, we decided to give you all the opportunity to ask us questions about it! Or about whatever you want, really!

As per usual… catch up on all previous Q&As right here first!


Week 1 : Chris MacLean, Customer Operations & Vulnerable Customers :santa:t2:
Week 2 : James Nicholson, iOS Engineer :green_apple:
Week 3 : Tara Mansfield, People Operations Manager :woman_technologist:t5::man_technologist:t3:
Week 4 : James Routley, Backend Engineer :hammer_and_wrench:
Week 5 : Hugh Wells, Customer Operations :policeman:t3:‍♂
Week 6 : Naz Malik, Technical Specialist :computer:
Week 7 : Fred Morgan, COps Squad Captain (Calls & Social Media) :telephone_receiver:
Week 8 : Emma Northcott, COps Scaling Team :balance_scale:
Week 9 : Jarno Wolf, COps Financial Crime Specialist & Squad Captain :wolf:
Week 10 : Maria Campbell, Head of People :woman_office_worker:t2::man_office_worker:t4:
Week 11 : Jim Amey, Night COps Captain :bat: :crescent_moon:
Week 12 : Richard Cook, Online Community Manager :man_cook:
Week 13 : Beatrice Borbon, Content & Press Manager :newspaper:
Week 14 : Tom Blomfield, CEO :crown:
Week 15 : Ella Johanny, COps/Hiring :handshake:
Week 16 : Harry Ashbridge, Writer :writing_hand:t3:
Week 17 : Beth Scott, Overnight COps :cat2:
Week 18 : Georgie Parmenter, Executive Assistant to the Founders :blonde_woman:
Week 19 : Vulnerable Customers Team :sunflower:
Week 20 : Leah Templeman, Interim VP People :sun_with_face:
Week 21 : Daniel Chatfield, Backend Engineer, Fincrime & Security :closed_lock_with_key:
Week 22 : Valerio Magliulo, Product Manager - Revenue Team :money_with_wings:
Week 23 : Sam Watkin, Operations Analyst :thinking:
Week 24 : Kieran McHugh, Backend Engineer :desktop_computer:
Week 25 : Jonas Huckestein, Co-Founder and Chief Technical Officer :computer_mouse:


This week we’ve got our Head of Marketing, Tristan Thomas, and Julie Oey from our Finance team in the Hot Coral Hot Seats™️!!!

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We’ll be running things a little bit faster this week, so Tristan and Julie will be answering all questions tomorrow afternoon (Tuesday)…so get your questions in now, folks!

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TIP: don’t buy a pack of 16 Piriton from the pharmacy, get your GP to prescribe a tub of 500!

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What are the things you guys would personally like to see in Monzo Annual report but can’t yet be published for whatever reason?

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I notice that the cost per customer went up in September of last year compared to June of that same year. Were there any reasons for this that you can divulge?

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Were you expecting the amount of press attention that’s been generated by the release of your annual report? It seems to have made much more of a stir this year, which can only be a good thing.

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Too-ups seem to be quite costly for Monzo, which is why they have been removed from the app for new users. Yet, Monzo.me is card payment-based. What, if anything, are your plans to curb the cost of Monzo.me payments, short or long-term?

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The headlines are all about Monzo’s increasing loss and directors pay but what do you think the main things we should take out of the report are?

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How does the £15 annual cost of running an account compare to that of a legacy bank?

It looks like around 5% of people have taken overdrafts so far. Is the plan still to gain most income from overdrafts or do you expect the bulk of income to come from other lending products that appear to a larger number of people?

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Has the cost of IT infrastrucutre per user continued to decrease becuase of improvements to your platform?

This graph is from 2016 I think:

k8s-cost

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If the marketplace is one of the main ways Monzo would like to make money, when can we expect to see it progress?

Other than a few posts/a few merchant tests, nothing seems to have come of it recently?

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We’ve seen recently that more tools have been brought to the app that allows customers to carry out their own actions instead of contacting support. What other features are you planning on bringing to the app that would help reduce the number of queries even further and therefore reduce the cost of providing support to customers?

Why is it that Monzo can run account at an insanely low price compared to other banks where it costs them in the region of £100 to run an account?

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How long can you keep going without funding assuming current cash burn rate remains fixed and assuming customer number is fixed at 1million for the near future?

I managed to work out the easy part - cash burn would be £15m a year (1m users x £15 per user), however I couldn’t figure out how much cash you actually have (cash in bank seems to be mingled in with customer deposits)?

Apologies if it’s a dumb question or I’ve skipped past it in the report. Accounts have always been a bit of a gremlin for me. :smiling_imp:

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Probably due to no branch network and cost of customer acquisition is low

Given the recent focus on fraud after the Ticketmaster incident, can you quantify any losses due to fraud and how they compare to the figures published by legacy banks.

Is there anything as users you just wish we would all stop doing, the things that seem to cost disproportionately high compare to the gain?
TBH, guessing this would be Card top-ups, but wondering if things like cancelling and setting up direct debits, or anything else you might not think comes with a cost is up there?

(said in jest)
Actually harder than you think to not wonder about what effect the pineapples and cats had on the report!

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It is a risky question as banks usually make money from lending. You might be told to be overdrawn more often and for longer :wink::rofl:

I guess if you we know what cost them money, then you could adjust your behaviour accordingly. But I am afraid if Monzo starts telling users not to carry out certain operations usually associated with personal banking, it might result in a backlash. It all has to be voluntary.:grin:

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Good point (feel like should retract my question), was just curious as I have a friend who seems to reorder new bank cards weekly after loosing them on nights out, and I always just wonder when enough is enough, guessing that costs lots of money for little appreciation ha.

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I hear you make a tiny bit of money each time a card is used at a merchant :moneybag:

Do any of the following incur Monzo a charge or do Monzo make money on any of the following?

  • Outbound FPS
  • Inbound FPS
  • When a Direct Credit is processed
  • When a Direct Debit is processed
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Just before Monzo Signups blew out the water :arrow_up: What was your estimation of how quickly Monzo would grow? For example, did you only predict to have 400,000 users at this point in time?

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Don’t know if it’s covered by this but I’d love to know if I incur a fee for Monzo each time I make a payment to my Amex (manual payment not DD). I make incremental payments daily, but would be conscious not to, if I knew there was cost involved for Monzo

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