Hi all, now that we’ve all gotten to know each other a bit better, it’s time to introduce you to some of my colleagues working behind the scenes to help bring Monzo to Ireland.
I thought an Ask Me Anything (AMA) series would be a fun way to give you all an exclusive peak behind the curtain, and why not start with one of the people working on the product team to give you all an insight of what it really takes to paint Ireland hot coral!
He’ll be popping in and out from next week (the first week of February) to answer your questions, so get asking!
Meet Emmanuel
”Emmanuel is a London-based Senior Product Manager at Monzo, where he has been working for the past year and a half. He brings over 10 years of product management experience across leading technology companies, having started his career as a Software Developer before moving into Product Management. Along the way, he also led an operations team across EMEA and APAC, giving him a strong execution and delivery mindset. Originally from Dijon, France — home of the world’s best mustard and wine — Emmanuel loves problem solving and is deeply passionate about product design. Outside of work, he spends most of his time entertaining his two young boys or playing tennis.”
I’d love to just track my pension in the app, not move it to monzo. Is this possible? Following on from that. It would be great to have a graph showing my overall networth (mortgage included)
The API doesn’t seem to have had much love over the last few years. Seems a shame since the community could build new ideas for you to integrate. Are there any plans to expand this or is OpenBanking too restrictive?
Features I would love to see:
Which payments have been split (pending & paid
Which payments have been added to a running tab (pending settlement & settled)
Balances of tabs
Ability to update custom categories. I’ve. Create new ones, change icon and icon colour (this would be huge to enable me to match my budget on Monzo with any other budgeting app)
I’m absolutely dying for a proper forecasting solution. I have been paying 3rd party budgeting software hundreds each year but none fully have this tool so I’m stuck with spreadsheets still
My scenario is that my wife and I have a child. We are doing a bathroom renovation and want to know how much we can afford on finance. The difficulty is what we can afford today is not the same as in the future. We hope to have another child in year or so which means we’re basically down to a single income household (maternity pay for her is not good). I don’t want to take out finance options for 5 years if this is unaffordable once we have our 2nd child
Random question but hey, it’s AMA. How was Monzo when you entered parenthood? Did you get good Paternity package and do you get allowances for if they are sick or anything?
One of the biggest challenges our start-up faces is the prioritisation of features. There are so many goals like revenue opportunities, user experience, internal tooling etc. What does your process for work prioritisation look like? Thanks
I object to the “Dijon best wine” unacceptable lie! I’m from Bordeaux, WE, have the best wine! Manu may be an excellent product manager but not a good wine appraisee, it appears….
Can you share with us anything unique or interesting you’ve found working on the Irish market? How did your mental models and code need to change?
Do you see the Irish / US / UK products diverging over time? Technically, are they the same code base? How integrated are things like support, hosting instances etc?
Most neobanks either aren’t available or have a limited offering.
Laws are slightly different than neighbouring countries (for saving accounts, for example) and there’s three official languages (Dutch, French and German), making it a bit more complex to “get it right”.
Traditional banks have looked at fintech, attempted to build similar features and seen it as “done” - while the value is in iterating from that first implementation, if you ask me.
Apart from some Revolut customers (popular with travellers, but Revolut damaged their reputation at times), I think most are not aware of the newer possibilities fintech open up.
I expect a lot of marketshare can be won by the bank that really understands the region and manages to win trust. @monzo: Always happy to discuss the region, if expansion is on the agenda
Hi! Is there any plans to implement “net worth” tracking into monzo? i.e - trading 212 api intergration, gold/precious metals intergration? We’ve got tracking tools, but nothing else! Thanks!
Question from Reddit: Hi! Is there any plans to implement “net worth” tracking into monzo? i.e - trading 212 api intergration, gold/precious metals intergration? We’ve got tracking tools, but nothing else! Thanks!
Prioritising features is indeed a significant challenge, one that we also face at Monzo. Our approach is to base these decisions on data rather than mere opinions. We balance several critical factors when deciding what to build and prioritise: user metrics, user feedback, and the estimated effort and associated risk of each initiative.
I’ve been fascinated by many things in the Irish market but the two that stayed with me are:
The opportunity for more customer-centric banking experiences than what has traditionally been offered.
How receptive the market has been to new players like Revolut, which I believe is largely driven by the desire for those better customer experiences.
We’re trying to offer Irish/US/UK users the best experience within their markets which means a common base that everyone needs: Card payment, bank transfers, etc.. And some level of localisation in the experience, the pricing and features.
