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

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 :wink:

@tom 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 :point_left:

  • 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” :blush:

  • 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” :wink: & delegating aggressively

  • The golden rule - “make something people want”

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