Monzo Staff Weekly Q&A - Annual Report Edition!

Monzo Chat
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Lots of questions! Here goes:

  1. Fair enough. Generally, we found a “financial hub” really appealed to a techy, early adopter group of people (like most of us here), but didn’t describe our long term ambitions. There’s this incredible emotional connection people have to their money and taking that stress away, making people feel in control of their money and ensuring they really are making it work for them is (to me) a much more ambitious and positive goal, long term. A core part of that is definitely building a financial hub — but it’s also much more than that, from the easy things like instant notifications to the bigger things like automatic energy provider switching. Does that make sense?
  2. Natwest are a business bank provider — we hold operating cash with them to pay invoices and staff etc. Not very interesting!
  3. If you’re thinking of the same press article I am, that particular piece had a very click-baity headline, that wasn’t backed up by the piece itself. In fact, the piece said “Monzo isn’t focusing on international expansion right now” or words to that effect — which is totally true. But it’s not moved to the backburner — it was never on the frontburner and so it’s still on the burner! Still totally part of our plan but we’ve always said and continue to say that we need to get the UK right first.
  4. Many! I truly believe we can build an ethical bank, that’s not a building society or a mutual. By doing crowdfunding, community (like this!), working out ethical policies and building it into our culture, I think we can have a long term, positive impact on society. There are some really interesting projects, like B-Corps, that do this perfectly and it’s something we’re very aware of.
  5. We’ve always said that the most likely exit is through an IPO in x years time. Nothing much has changed there :slight_smile:
  6. Yes, totally — it’s a great point. The mission is a part of that — we’re also spending more time on understanding what our internal culture is and helping to train new joiners on that. It’s really easy when there’s 20 of you and you all have lunch together — it’s significantly more difficult at 300 employees and will be very difficult at 3000! It’s an ongoing battle, but I’m confident we can make it work :slight_smile:
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