Customer deposits were £71.2m — equivalent to less than £150 per account. Although the bank expects to have 1m current accounts by autumn, 80 per cent of new customers do not deposit their salaries with it.
But the figures show the group’s slow progress in encouraging customers to adopt it as their primary bank.
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I guess I’m sticking over the word ‘struggling’. The FT is one columnist’s take on things. I guess we (and the FT) really don’t know if Monzo are hitting targets or are “struggling”. It’s a loaded word, and I was questioning the objectivity of it. Thanks for sharing the link.
With regards to the ‘fairness’ of the bonus, I’m happy that Monzo are trialling ways in which to grow. They’ve been honest that growth is a major target. People are always going to miss out on deals just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. If the scheme is designed to analyse who would be the best data subjects, then yes it’s ‘fair’ just as it’s ‘fair’ that a suit I happened to buy this week was reduced in a sale two days later, or my decision to fix for five years on my mortgage exactly five years ago means I now have fewer remortgage deals than I would have had six months ago, or I once took 97 seconds to respond to an email and therefore missed out on owning a share of Monzo. It’s not unfair just because someone gets something you don’t.
With regards to the original question I asked, it was only ever a polite conversation starter, and any misunderstanding was in the mind of the reader. Stop bringing your own value judgement to others’ comments.
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I don’t see an issue with the word struggling when the majority of customers aren’t switching. The FT are only reporting on the figures from monzos own financial report. I’m just stating the facts but obviously things could have improved since that report.
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I didn’t use switch. I moved everything manually. Until recently I didn’t get my salary paid into monzo either.
I don’t see salary being paid in as a great marker as to whether they’re struggling. 20,000 new accounts a week tells me otherwise.
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I think people are taking what i’m saying as a criticism, i’m just stating the facts. It’s clear monzo is focused on trying to get people to do a full switch so I see nothing wrong or surprising with them using every method they can to get people to do that.
The next publicly released stats will show Monzo at top of CASS inbound switches.
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That’s what I would’ve expected but I don’t know the most recent figures.
I agree with @j06 - I don’t think “struggling” is really an appropriate term.
Look, obviously it’s in the best interests of the company if everyone is #FullMonzo and it’d be mindblowing if that happened overnight. But that’s not how it works. It’s really about two things : education and incentives.
With the former, it’s about selling the benefits. This is hard in one sense because you already have to “sell” the benefits of having an account in the first place, and one of the biggest causes of banking inertia is that people don’t even realise you can have more than one bank. It’s perhaps easier in another sense in that you already have the customer, so then you focus the education on the features that you get when you go Full Monzo - proper usage of Summary, a more complete picture of your finances, visibility of your bills going out and your money coming in before that even happens, etc. You have to hone in on the USPs.
This is something we’re 100% doing. UI improvements to bring focus to different things, making it seamless, improving the signup flow, etc.
Then the other thing is incentives. These can be monetary, but they don’t have to be. It’s quite possible that the monetary incentives won’t end up making a meaningful difference to us but equally… They might? So we’ll test and find out. It would be very dangerous for us to assume behaviours, which is why we run experiments.
We are pleased with the amount of incoming CASS switches we are getting right now, just as we’re pleased that we just reached a million users. Tom told me yesterday that his mind is focused on how we get from 1 million users to 10 million users, and by the same token, we’re looking at how we increase CASS switches by 10x or more. To infer that we are “struggling” because of that is a misunderstanding, in the same way that media articles that lead with “Monzo lost £xxx million in the last year” misunderstand the situation.
We intended to spend that money on working towards profitability, and we are under absolutely no illusion that a higher percentage of people will CASS over for absolutely no reason and without us doing anything to encourage the behaviour.
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The beautiful thing about this community is that we can call out things we disagree with and then Monzo get in touch and we debate … freakin awesome.
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I don’t want to get into a debate about English 
From the outside, it could easily look like monzo is struggling to convince people to make a full switch, that’s what the figures that I’ve seen suggest. Monzo is making a loss and I don’t see what’s wrong with stating that.
Obviously, the long-term plan is to be profitable and have the majority of customers use monzo as their main account. That’s the goal but there is nothing to say that will happen.
Is it just me or would anyone else switch just for some #fullmonzo stickers?
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Socks, all I ask for is 
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I am wearing my Freetrade socks right now. Hot pink and magnificent!
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I’m still waiting for mine … are they lovely and snuggly?
two lots of merch by mistake!
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Ha ha haha ahahahahah!!
Dog looks left out …
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Despite my light trolling…I think the £50 thing is an ace idea and that speed at which it is credited is insane.
And it’s just life that sometimes you have to do a hard sell to then let the product speak for itself.
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I can’t see Monzo ever rolling out a £50 switch bonus. They expect to have over 3m users next year… imagine if 2m of them got a £50 switch bonus - that’s £100m cost.
A) They don’t have this money and B) They don’t have a blank cheque from investors. On the contrary… investors (or prospective VCs) are nudging them to become profitable.
A/B testing can have very little to do with reality and this topic has just been full of people reading far too much into it and moaning that they didn’t get £50 and someone else did. They need to have highs and lows in the sample to pinpoint how elastic a user’s decision making is. There is probably a £1 bonus and a £100 bonus in there as well to see how the amount affects the decision.
Another case of monzo’s transparency coming back to kick them in the teeth. If it were.another bank these tests would have been carried out in a vault with NDAs all round.
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I agree that struggling is probably not right, but my worry in this is the lack of pro-active transparency, which is what I thought Monzo is about.
We’re all invested in the journey which is why we accept that not all features are available or polished yet. Finding out about stuff via a Twitter user though, rather than you guys talking about it on here feels a let down somehow. It’s not about the money for me, it’s the perceived relationship with you and others at Monzo.
I think there’s a third thing, functionality. I understand the need to increase users, but it feels like the focus has moved to increasing new users at the expense of existing ones. Key features like the the graph are difficult to interpret, the budgeting wheel just doesn’t work if I have spending targets switched on, switching between accounts is confusing, and though I desperately want to go #FullMonzo, I can’t, because JA pots don’t exist and SEPA isn’t supported, meaning I can’t get my salary paid in.
Add to that the issues with support at the moment and it all feels a bit well, frustrating.
I don’t mind waiting for improvements, I understand there is more than one team working really hard, but the forum sets Monzo apart (especially since Starling closed theirs),and there seems to be less Monzo engagement, less openness about what is now being prioritised (and the Trello roadmap doesn’t help) and less response to forum posts where people are saying “would appreciate an update”.
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Cards on the table, this year I have made ~£500 from switching banks (a burner account). It’s a slight pain in the arse making sure you hit the criteria and chasing banks that don’t pay within their timeframe (I’m looking at you, FirstDirect). But, for the slight effort the reward was worth it.
Do I still have any of the accounts that I switched to after the bonus was paid? Nope! They got switched to the next bonus paying bank or closed by switching them into Monzo.
For me, Monzo has improved my financial awareness for more than two years. The value it adds is insane. I’d sooner not get a financial bonus and see exactly where my money is going and how I can manage it better.
However, if Monzo feel it may add some value to the company then that’s not for me to question. The shareholders need to make money. And we all know you gotta spend money to make money.
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