Monzo: The First Truly Digital Bank [with Tom] - FinTech Insider podcast 📻

[alexs (Alex Sherwood)]

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

FinTechInsider (FinTechInsiders)

@anon91821566 talks about…

• What he expected to be when he grew up - a lawyer & why he decided to do be an entrepreneur instead

• His first job, experience working with technology & founding GoCardless before FinTech was a buzzword

• “Last week Monzo grew about 6% or 7% week on week”

• 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

• The record breaking CrowdCube crowd funding round

• “Hopefully we’ll be doing the next crowdfunding round in the next couple of months.”

• What Monzo’s average customer looks like & how this has changed

• 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

• When the overdrafts are launched, “you will not go overdrawn without saying; yes I want to do this”

• Monzo’s approach to product design & striving to be customer centric first, rather than product centric

• Trying to build the first bank with network effect

• How the application process for a banking license has gone & why the “rigorous process” has been positive

• 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”

• Reducing fraud with rules & machine learning

• How the company is structured, reorganising the Monzo team & empowering people, as much as possible. Encouraging risk taking and not punishing failure.

• Monzo testing the new spending report, which was broken, with a smaller group of users & then rolling it out to all users

• Maintaining the pace of growth & the how getting the bank ready has slowed Monzo down, for now

• “The community forum is incredibly heavily trafficked, by about 5% of our user base”

• 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

• Ambitions to bring sneak peeks into the app

• Out of the challenger banks - Tandem, Starling & Monzo - who’s going to win?

• The implications of the government’s changes to regulation

• How will Monzo break out & gain mainstream adoption - “product”

• “We did try some tube ads, they don’t work.”

• Viral growth, with Nubank as an example

• Banks bribing customers to switch their accounts

• Tom “not really doing the work anymore” & delegating aggressively

• The golden rule - “make something people want”