You can listen to the latest in depth interview with Tom here.
Edit - the new link above has a video of the interview, as well as a transcript of some of it. Nice to see that he dressed up for the occasion
@tom talks about…
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What he expected to be when he grew up - a lawyer & why he decided to do be an entrepreneur instead
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His first job, experience working with technology & founding GoCardless before FinTech was a buzzword
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“Last week Monzo grew about 6% or 7% week on week”
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How Monzo’s just getting to the starting line & the next goal of 1m customers - which is when the big banks will sit up and start to take notice
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The record breaking CrowdCube crowd funding round
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“Hopefully we’ll be doing the next crowdfunding round in the next couple of months.”
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What Monzo’s average customer looks like & how this has changed
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The features Tom finds the most useful - budgeting & the fee free overseas transactions but it’s the feeling of visibility & control and the reduction of anxiety that’s most valuable
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When the overdrafts are launched, “you will not go overdrawn without saying; yes I want to do this”
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Monzo’s approach to product design & striving to be customer centric first, rather than product centric
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Trying to build the first bank with network effect
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How the application process for a banking license has gone & why the “rigorous process” has been positive
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Are we in the golden years of challenger banks? “N26 & Nubank are a year or so ahead” but “it feels like the race hasn’t yet started”
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Reducing fraud with rules & machine learning
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How the company is structured, reorganising the Monzo team & empowering people, as much as possible. Encouraging risk taking and not punishing failure.
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Monzo testing the new spending report, which was broken, with a smaller group of users & then rolling it out to all users
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Maintaining the pace of growth & the how getting the bank ready has slowed Monzo down, for now
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“The community forum is incredibly heavily trafficked, by about 5% of our user base”
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Not building everything that the ‘power users’ in the community request, as it would be too hard for the other 95% of users to get to grips with
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Ambitions to bring sneak peeks into the app
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Out of the challenger banks - Tandem, Starling & Monzo - who’s going to win?
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The implications of the government’s changes to regulation
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How will Monzo break out & gain mainstream adoption - “product”
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“We did try some tube ads, they don’t work.”
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Viral growth, with Nubank as an example
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Banks bribing customers to switch their accounts
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Tom “not really doing the work anymore” & delegating aggressively
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The golden rule - “make something people want”