Lolz…so many comments I could quote right now decrying this…who will now suddenly be on board with bribes…
Sorry, but ‘fair’ in this context is pretty meaningless and it’s in opening things up to this sort of comment that I feel is where transparency really falls down.
‘Fair’ is such a subjective comment that I don’t think any one of us can really justify transferring our own interpretation of it onto other people or organisations. I’d be laughed at for complaining that FD was recently giving people £100 (or whatever) for switching to them when I didn’t get it 20 years ago.
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And yet, a Twitter search for the phrase only brings up one tweet.
As @SC95 said, it’s not private if it’s a publicly available tweet. 
Let’s use common sense in this context then…
Someone gets 50 pound for switching, you don’t this for following the same process.
It would universally be accepted that this wasn’t fair
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Especially when, as I said, my partner is eligible to switch right now but this option isn’t available to him. But if Joe Bloggs signs up for an account right now, he may be offered the money. First Direct at least offered it to everyone at the same time, and switched it off when they didn’t want to pay out anymore. Shouldn’t Monzo have just done the same thing and when it runs out, it runs out?
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I can afford to live in London, others can’t. That’s not fair either. So much of our lives are different from one another.
What line of ‘fairness’ are you trying to draw? 
(As in, at what point is it suddenly ‘wrong’?)
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Well maybe those of us that can’t, are the ones that would be more upset about missing out on the switching bonus.
Sorry buddy. Terrible argument. The example you give has too many factors involved.
If you follow a process, and someone else follows the same process - one gets rewarded, the other doesn’t- it’s a rubbish system and it isn’t fair.
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I honestly think if they announced this whilst it’s an experiment it’d be a bad move.
The data they’d be analysing would be totally meaningless and would involve bias.
They’ll have a pool of X customers with this visible, and a control sample of X without it. They’ll compare the outcomes and see if it made any difference.
Announcing it would just ruin the experiment.
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This doesn’t sit right with me at all. Part of the appeal for Monzo as that they wanted to create value that meant you’d choose them despite other banks offering switching bonuses.
Hopefully this is just an experiement and not a glimpse of the future.
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But users are announcing it on Twitter, so surely that would have the same effect? It isn’t like it can be kept secret.
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That would be a fair argument if they’d forgotten how the internet works. Nothing like this is ever secret
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Hey, we can disagree, that’s fine.
I guess I just don’t believe that what someone did yesterday has to constrain what they can do tomorrow because of ‘fairness’. If they can affort to be ‘nicer’ to people now than they could before, good for them. I’d far rather someone got a bonus in future than no-one got one at all because of ‘fairness’.
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Monzo could have simply said ‘we are going to trail switching bonus for closed group’ 
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I get it and you’re right. But how else can they run an experiment? That’s out of their control
I agree they’ll know people are likely to share it and give it away, but if I was the one running the experiment, I’d want to protect the data as much as possible.
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It’s just as strange as only some people getting a £5 referral bonus.
It’s hard to ‘hate’ (not hating) on this without sounding sore about not getting free money 
… BUT, it does seem a tad unfair for some random percentage of users to receive things when all else is equal.
No new user deserves £5 or £50 any more than any other user, so the A/B nature of this test doesn’t sit well with me Especially the lack of announcement - be that on the forum or even more publicly
I’m sure anybody who does get a free £50 will be very pleased though 
Just needs some more transparency, etc. (all IMO)
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I get what you are saying, but we are talking about today, not yesterday. And today one person will get £50 and another won’t. Call it unfair, wrong, unlucky, whatever. It doesn’t seem right to me. That’s all I have to say really.
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So … This is what Monzo should have told community IMHO;
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Yeah, I see the point. I guess I’d try and argue it in terms of whether the £50 was a right or a privilege. (Equally, if I’d just switched yesterday I would also probably feel a little differently…)
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Thanks for sharing this, not on twitter so wouldn’t have seen it otherwise!
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