Monzo Waiting List

Hello all, first time poster in the Monzo community.

Received my card this morning, very impressed with how easy it was to set up and the general user experience already. Top work so far! Just wanted to raise something that caught my attention about the in-app waiting list…

I signed up about a week ago on Android, and was placed at 19,000ish in the waiting list, and thought I was in for the long hall. Four days pass and I get up to 16,000ish, with regular reminders to share with my friends to jump up the list.

The next day, I am told that my Monzo card is on its way. Great news! However, it did strike me as odd that after a few days of small gains (and reminders to share), I suddenly jump 15,000ish places to the front of the queue.

I am not saying that this was a deliberate ploy to get me to share it with friends (god knows how the Monzo internals work), but it did feel like that :expressionless:

Monzo-like companies are clearly the future of personal banking, but banking relationships are built on trust. Cheap tricks like the one I am concocting in my head are a quick way to lose customer confidence.

Did anyone else get this impression? or am I just making connections where none exist?

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At one point, the queue certainly was legitimate. The numbers made some kind of sense and it did serve a purpose. The queue only started to be visibly inaccurate around the time that it was split (then later rejoined) for Android users. Most notably, the queue no longer seems to count down as well as it used to.

Nowadays, I’m not sure what is up with the queue at all. There’s been a lot of work put in to it and each update has made it more confusing to try and explain to people. It’s all kind of BS anyway with the number of virtual and physical golden tickets, university email methods and hidden signup URLs floating around. :confused:

I’m not sure how this makes the queue figure illegitimate. Those offers just mean that you skip the queue & if you skip the queue then you’ll never be a user that’s counted as a member of the queue in front of other users, right?

I’ve always understood the reason for the queue ending up shorter than expected has always been

think about all the reasons why someone might initially register - a recommendation from a friend, promotion at an event etc. & then be put off - by the requirement to initially fund their account with x amount, by the wait or because they realise that there are other benefits for using their legacy bank’s services.

Those users are all in the queue, ahead of other users but aren’t signing up. So if you also make it to the top of the queue & do activate your account, you end up getting you account before them - that seems fair enough :slight_smile:

Hey! I’m not quite sure what you’re asking here.

We do have a system whereby referring friends moves you up the list, but I’m not sure whether you’re saying that you did this or not. The general wait for the waiting list is only a few weeks max.

For the most part, the waiting list allows us to grow at a scaled rate whilst we’re still in Beta. We can estimate the growth, and we can view the extra weight it puts on the Operations team in terms of the number of queries we get, etc etc etc.

Whilst we are developing the service, it would be a terrible situation if (for example) a hugely famous celebrity decided to go on a tweet-storm about how great we are, and suddenly we got 20,000 new users in the space of a day. While this sounds great, it’s clearly impractical - we can only send out so many cards based on our current infrastructure, we can only handle so many queries based on the number of staff we have… etc etc.

The queues allow us to manage all of that and the referrals allow us to identify and reward passionate users.

We listen to all feedback though, so may I ask what it is about the waiting list seems to you to be a “cheap trick” and would cause you to lose confidence? Obviously that’s not an impression we want to give!

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I don’t know about the queue side of things. I know I waited for a bit, but then got my card fairly quickly. However, I think it might be an IT issue rather than a cheap trick to get you to sign up. I don’t think Monzo needs cheap tricks to get people signing up at present.

I’ve only ever found Monzo to be friendly, helpful, sincere and extremely transparent. I’m sure you will to once you start getting into it. Once the current accounts proper come along,things will be even better I’m sure.

Welcome on board!

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Oh it doesn’t at all, it does make the queue entirely irrelevant to anybody who really wants in and is willing to ask around a little though.

I am puzzled by the sudden jumps I hear from high numbers to registration, almost as if it’s either done in huge batches or there are a large number of people at the “front of the queue” who haven’t completed that next stage but are still included in the numbers.

My guess is it’s this. But it sounds good for Monzo to say there are x number of users in the queue so they don’t clear out the old registrations (maybe).

Indeed, I wouldn’t call this malicious or a trick at all, just seemingly a side effect of the system with a solution too complex to bother with when everybody gets in within about one or two weeks anyway. :slight_smile:

I would argue that the number should probably be in consideration for removal entirely and possibly replaced with some kind of average time to card.

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We do see people that reach the top of the queue, and then don’t complete the signup. Obviously there’s all sorts of reasons for this, and we reach out to these users to find out why. I’m not sure on the current figures for this but they would still show as being in the waiting list… because they are, it’s just that the wait is now their choice :smile:

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That’s not a bad idea…I should have mentioned, to be fair, you don’t want to cut off users who’ve registered & taken ‘too long’ to fund their accounts because if they did then decide they were ready, they’d have to restart the process again…

I expect Monzo could get to a more precise queue number. If you work out how long a user usually waits before there’s less than a 50% ? chance that they’ll sign up, then remove all users who’ve been in the queue longer than that number of days from the number of queue members, I expect you’d get to a more accurate figure - is that fair?

But at the end of the day, when it’s only a couple of week’s wait, this isn’t really worth worrying about. And the number of ‘stalled’ users who’ve reached the top of the queue a while ago but not funded their cards won’t matter once Monzo really picks up momentum because the number will be so small, relatively speaking, that it will be insignificant…

That all depends on the reasons why they haven’t made the jump and that’s why we reach out to them. There’s no real need to remove those people from the list - that would only inconvenience the people who inevitably would end up having to get on the list again. And as you said, when the wait is short, it’s just not worth doing purely to get a more precise queue number. I’m not sure anyone is really clamouring for a super accurate queue number.

That said, we have experimented and brainstormed different ideas for the queue to make it a more pleasant experience. Sam on our Design team showed me some awesome animated things a while back, but having not looked at the onboarding flow for a while, I can’t recall whether we included any of it yet!

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I should have been clearer, I was suggesting removing the users in the queue who are unlikely (based on the criteria I suggested) from the number of users in the queue that users see on the holding page but not actually removing them from the queue so they can still signup, as soon as they’re ready.

Anyway, as you say & as I mentioned, I don’t think a slightly inaccurate figure is a big deal :slight_smile:

Oh, I see what you mean! But then, having two different figures for the waiting list wouldn’t be in the interests of transparency :slight_smile:

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Oh wow, good discussion. I hadn’t considered Alex’s point which makes a whole lot of sense… [quote=“alexs, post:3, topic:7121”]
think about all the reasons why someone might initially register - a recommendation from a friend, promotion at an event etc. & then be put off - by the requirement to initially fund their account with x amount, by the wait or because they realise that there are other benefits for using their legacy bank’s services.
[/quote]

The only reason I raise this is that Monzo’s competitive advantage in this market is Citibadger’s observation… [quote=“Citibadger, post:5, topic:7121”]
I’ve only ever found Monzo to be friendly, helpful, sincere and extremely transparent.
[/quote]

…and the queue thing made me (and clearly others in the community) to take a double take.

To Alex’s point above… [quote=“alexs, post:13, topic:7121”]
I don’t think a slightly inaccurate figure is a big deal
[/quote]

…yeah, in the grand scheme this is minor issue, but there is surely a quick win to be had here to calm users with over active imaginations. Perhaps a super simple solution would be to add a small caveat in the app sign on process saying something along the lines of…

“The queue numbers can be unpredictable, so you may receive a card earlier than you think!”

This would have calmed my nerves anyway :grin:

You’ll also notice on the product roadmap a block to spend some time to improve this (considerably) :slight_smile: More details soon!

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It might sound ridiculous but I have to admit that the queue wasn’t the greatest first impression I expected.

In the last 8 days I moved maybe 1500 places (none in last 2 days) and there are more than 10 000 new users behind me.

If you can’t cope with the demand why ask people to bring even more users. Imagine if your queue goes to 50 000 or even more, that will surely not be a good PR in order to get more customers on board…

Dawid, I received my card this week and actually it’s better than it looks.
I started around 22,8XXth place in the queue. I was on the same place for about 3 days. I moved by 1k up within 4-5 days, in about 3 jumps.
Then I moved to 19,5XXth, ish, place in the queue. Then it asked me to deposit initial £100 and my card was with me 2 working days later. In total, it was 11 days from registration to receiving my card.

It was commented elsewhere that queue has some legacy stuff and more people overall appear to be waiting than there actually are. Then there comes ‘ultimate commitment’, so depositing monies, where I guess conversion rates suffer a bit!

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I’ve signed up purely to comment here. I’d never heard of monzo, read up on it and gained the confidence to join up. I can tell you now as a tech friendly person - to be greeted by the “invite three friends” message immediately started alarm bells ringing. Especially as an outsider of the community. Fortunately this has now subsided but I certainly don’t feel like it was a brilliant first impression. Reminds me all those fake Facebook competitions that the “older and/or less technologically enabled” friends would fall for.

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I signed up before the whole invite three friends idea. I’ll admit I’d probably not have bothered and turned tail if I saw what Monzo are doing now with the three friends thing given my time as a new user again.

I agree that the queue system was in my opinion way better as I HATE when friends spam me on Facebook with game and add-on requests. I don’t do them myself in the hope that other’s don’t to me, I find it feels way to spammy and I block requests from anyone sending one without asking before hand or on my request.

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