I moved to the UK when I was young and have spent about half my life living there, eventually attaining Indefinite Leave to Remain status. I worked for a few companies in London during my summers at uni and have been closely tied to the city for a while now! A contact introduced me to the Monzo team a little over two years ago and I fell in love with the company. I studied economics at uni and have always been interested in the financial markets but also wanted to start my career with an exciting startup, so I found Monzo to be the perfect company. At that time we only had one full-fledged Customer Operations employee, and we had no one looking after the evenings. I was spending a lot of my time in California around then, and Monzo was looking into providing overnight support, so I came on board as part of a trial period to see if this was something we’d be interested in scaling. Being 8 hours behind London, the timing worked out perfectly for this. Things went really well and I was eventually taken on board as a full-fledged employee, and I’ve overseen the expansion of our overnight team ever since! 
I actually set up my first ever bank account in the UK, so most of the surprises have actually been the other way around! I’d say the most obvious differences I’ve seen would be:
- The widespread use of contactless in the UK - this is just now starting to become more common in the US
- The ubiquity of free ATM withdrawals in the UK - in the US you’ll only be able to withdraw cash for free if the ATM is owned by the bank that provides your account!
- Overdraft usage is rare in the US - most people use credit cards instead as most overdrafts come with significant fees
- Instant inter-bank transfers through Faster Payments - until recently this has virtually been non-existent in the US and transfers between banks can take up to a few working days. There are a few new companies providing workarounds to this, but for many this still isn’t an option
As for the 
, I definitely don’t feel as strongly about this as some people do 
I’m not the biggest fan myself and love a nice New York style pepperoni, but I say put whatever you want on your pizza! 
On a lot of their past tours, Green Day used to form a band onstage from audience members to play a song they covered a while back - “Knowledge” by Operation Ivy. It’s a slowed down version of the song, and has a relatively easy drum beat. I was a decent player for my age at the time and tried to spice things up a little bit, which led to the frontman asking me to take a stage dive when I was done! I’ll often joke that my life has only been downhill from there 
Not as much as one may think - in training we focused a lot on British phrases, spelling, and general cultural differences with the goal of having the customer experience as close as it could be to what you’d receive from a UK-based team. Some small things will crop up on occasion but having everyone’s default language set to British English helps a lot!
As far as concepts/processes go, these weren’t too difficult to learn. Most have at least a somewhat similar US equivalent, or are relatively straightforward in themselves. Small things that are engrained were more challenging - getting used to saying pounds instead of dollars was probably the toughest one!
Definitely in some circles - I’d say most people involved in the tech space in places like San Francisco and New York have at least heard of us and are interested in what we’re doing. There were a few articles from US-based outlets, such as this one that brought some broader attention to us in the US, but I would say we’re not quite “mainstream” in the US as of now.
There are several companies in the US that could be competitors, but I’d say virtually none of these are trying to do exactly what we are. Companies like Simple, Zero, and Venmo come to mind but they’re focused on more niche products, or prepaid and credit cards, rather than building the best bank in the world entirely from the ground up 
It’s pretty tough to think of things the American banking system does better than the UK - in general I think banking in the UK is more advanced and simpler. On average, I’d say banking apps are more user-friendly in the US, and more people in the US are happier with their legacy banks’ apps than in the UK. Additionally, almost all US banking apps support mobile cheques deposits via photo, which is something that’s not yet widespread in the UK. We use cheques a lot more than the UK though, so this is a bit contradictory!
I grew up with dogs and am allergic to cats, so that’s an easy one! 
Between those, I’d have to go with beer! My real favourite is sake though 
Depends whom I’m talking to! The US spellings are certainly more efficient I’ve spent so much time in both to where I tend to use either depending on the circumstance.
Absolutely! As you note, there are some things that we’d have to approach a bit differently (providing cheques comes to mind), but there’s no reason why we wouldn’t be able to offer an awesome product in the US as well down the line 
Compared to the US, certainly!
There will be challenges in a number of different areas - I think this may be best addressed by a separate post as there’s quite a lot to think about!
The US system works relatively similarly in most areas, just with different names. The most glaring difference is what you suggest - our inter-bank transfers go through a system called Automatic Clearing House (ACH) and can take up to a few days to come through. There’s no real Faster Payments equivalent, though services like Zelle are starting to fill this gap.
Remote working certainly comes with its challenges, but we do an amazing job of overcoming these and the challenges are much less pronounced than you may expect. We’ve already built a large remote team (I talked a bit about this a while back, here which has helped a lot as we already have a robust communication infrastructure for workers outside of our main office.
We’re currently looking into how we can employ people directly in the US, and the timeline of that will inform how much we plan on expanding the team here. We certainly expect the team to be much bigger by this time next year!
Of course! There can only be one best bank in the world 
That’s a great question, Simon! There are lots of small things we could have done differently. Broadly, we tried to move rather quickly, as we tend to do at Monzo, in setting up the site. We set some ambitious timelines that ultimately were delayed as we worked through the logistics of the project. This led to fair bit of stress, so I think we could have planned for a bit more time to resolve the “unknown” as we were going about setting up the site to make sure expectations were realistic from the beginning.
I touched on this a bit above, but most likely not through in-app chat! I don’t think our British accents are quite up to scratch to say the same for calls though
- Simon contributed in a number of areas during training. In many ways he is the personification of Monzo, so he contributed a ton in helping to build out the culture here.
- It was common knowledge, as you know we value transparency!
- The timing actually coincided with us removing Intercom locations for everyone for security reasons!
- Because of the logistics of training and working with a partner, hiring home workers wasn’t really an option for this. As we’ve done in the UK, we thought it was a important to establish an office as a hub from which we could base operations, with the option of expanding beyond it in the future.
- I go back and forth regularly actually - the timing depends on whatever I’m working on at the time!
- Because of my connection to the UK, I actually do have a Monzo account
- We’re always working on exciting new projects to help benefit our customers - I’m sure you’ll hear about some new things soon!
- I’m really not a huge musical fan, so I’m not sure I could do that question justice.
I don’t think the murder point is very accurate! I touched on this a bit in the blog, but since this is a Customer Operations site, Las Vegas worked really well mainly because of the time difference, customer service culture, and low cost of living.
Ask and you shall receive! 
I oversee all of our overnight operations and am technically known as a Squad Captain Manager for our night remote squads and the Sin City Squad! I spend my time in Vegas as needed, and generally go about once every five weeks now. Otherwise I mainly work from home and split my time between Los Angeles and London. Salaries have generally all been in GBP but we’re currently looking into adjusting this at we expand our international workforce!
Thanks for the great questions everyone! 