Monzo Staff Weekly Q&A - Tom Blomfield (CEO)

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

Everybody! It’s THAT TIME AGAIN!

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Question Time? Party Time? Having an awesome Time? Catching up with all of our previous Q&A’s Time? All of the above………Time? :thinking_face:

Monzo Weekly Staff Q&A Time!

We felt bad for taking a week off from doing Community Q&A. Actually no. It’s important to not overwhelm one’s self, or any other selves. Breaks are good. We encourage breaks. So take a break right now from what you’re doing because THIS IS HUGE! No joke! We’ve rolled out the Hot Coral Carpet™️ leading all the way to the Hot Coral Hot Seat™️

Folks, it is happening. It’s a huge milestone week for us as we’ve ended our Beta program and bid it a fond farewell, and thanks for the memories. We’ve got the first rollout of CASS starting with a handful of lucky folks too!

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There was really only one logical choice for the Q&A this week. So get your questions in. Fair warning, if we get too many, we might have to set a cap. So make ’em good ones, and get them in fast.

This week, the chair belongs to……… Our CEO, Tom Blomfield!!!

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Drop your questions below…… Tom will be here on Friday to answer them!

So…….this is clearly the biggest Staff Q&A to date……so……… I got new rules I count ’em

  1. No stupid questions please. We trust you to know the difference between light-hearted ones and just asking nonsense.
  2. Tom is a busy man, so we can’t guarantee he’ll be able to answer every question posted. If needs be, we’ll cap the amount of questions asked.
  3. You get one question each, to make it fair. So make it a good one!
  4. We won’t be commenting on speculative integrations with third parties.
  5. Please don’t make bait or troll posts - we’ll be issuing warnings if we determine this to be happening.
  6. For any of my colleagues who didn’t see the internal message, we all have ample opportunity to ask Tom questions every week, so let’s keep this one for our community users!

This thread will be heavily moderated to ensure we can follow these rules :grinning:

Let’s go!!!

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OMG SOOO MANY QUESTIONS!!!

What is your daily work routine?

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When you started Monzo, did you already have connections in the payments & banking industry or was it all from scratch, and if so, how did you do it? The barrier to entry seems quite high (I can’t just go to GPS and ask them to make me a prepaid card for example*) so what were the initial steps to get through that?

*before anyone asks, this is not a sneaky attempt to make my own bank :joy: already got plenty of challenges in the telecoms sector. :wink:

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What is your favourite thing to do to relax?

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I’m not sure if I can ask a product specific question but here it goes anyway…

I long time ago I remember you replying to a comment of mine telling me about the spread the payments scheme you were testing where I could split a large payment into a few monthly chunks and pay a small amount of interest on it. What was the outcome / progress of this? Is it something Monzo is still looking at and is it coming anytime soon? :slight_smile:

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How many countries have you personally used your Monzo card in?

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If you could choose any other job, what would it be?

(And do you like cats)

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Back in the mists of the Mondo days, you posted about how you think credit cards don’t directly solve people’s problems, but are a product that work for banks and are therefore offered to people. In that, you asked what problems people were trying to solve with credit cards, and an interesting thread evolved discussing why and how people use them.

Can you share your thoughts on how some of these uses could be better addressed in a way that is focused on people’s problems? I’m not asking for details or guarantees of future Monzo features/products, but more your thinking about how a bank could address these issues (which are very convenient/useful for a large number of people) without relying on extorting those who get themselves into debt.

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Of all of the decisions that you had to make as CEO, would you make any decision differently, knowing what you know now? :slight_smile: I’m not necessarily asking for decisions you might regret, just retrospective “what if” exercise with a bit of heavy hypothesizing.

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What’s Monzo’s average Customer Acquisition Cost at the moment?

Link for the benefit of other user’s, not Tom’s :wink:

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What is the one feature you are waiting for appearing in Monzo App? Also, which one has been most useful for you till now and the one you rather not have.

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How has using Monzo changed your approach to your personal finances? Have there been any benefits or drawbacks you hadn’t considered before making it your main bank account?

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Turned down any offers recently…? :wink:

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Looking at the year in review, back to April 2017, what are the key lessons you’ve learnt from that period of time? Also, what have you struggled the most with over that period?

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What’s the most bonkers thing you’ve discovered / conversation you’ve had about how the banking system has traditionally worked?

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Will you ever offer any sort of interest on savings?

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What’s the most challenging decision you’ve had to make since you started Monzo?

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I’ve recently joined Monzo, and I’m very pleased with what Monzo provides :grin::+1:t2:. However, you’ve probably had many questions on this, when is Apple Pay coming? This is the one thing that is stopping me from fully transfering over to Monzo. :cry:

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Why should we bank with Monzo over another challenger?

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Are there any opportunities to invest in Monzo?

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