After a short intermission weāre going to continue picking the brain of the Monzo staff
This week we have @JonH who is one of our fantastic Backend Engineers who has very kindly offered to answer some questions. A little introduction from Jon below
Hi everyone
Iām Jon and Iām an engineer in Monzoās Borrowing team, which is where Iāve spent all of my 3+ years at Monzo.
Before Monzo I spent 5 years as a management consultant, flying around the world to build people spreadsheets, which looking back was a bit of an environmental nightmare
Now I build systems to help people who have a Monzo borrowing product and then find themselves in financial difficulty. Most recently thatās meant supporting the launch of Monzo Flex, which Iām really excited about!
Feel free to get your questions in - Jon will be around until Friday 19th Nov
This might be a bit better answered by our team available through the in app chat service. Head to the Help section and youāll be able to speak to someone there
Thinking out loud because I have no idea what goes on (and how stupid / narrow minded it probably sounds) I always assumed help and support was done through chat. Mainly with guidance and recommendations to use government backed services who help people with debt for example.
This is obviously for some of the more serious cases, beyond perhaps payment breaks and freezing interest I assume. Unless these are some of the tools youāre referring to
Or are they tools for the customer rather than the specialists? Like gambling block for example.
Would you rather find mushed up banana every time you put your hand in your pocket or have your Mum see your full browser history once? (Sorted by most embarrassing, so she doesnāt miss anything good)
Wow, thereās a lot I could talk about here. Which bits are you most interested in @Revels?
Iāll assume the ābuilding people spreadsheetsā for a moment. This covered a lot of ground. Examples included:
modelling business decisions (āif we change the price of this product by this much, how much more/less profit do we think weāll make based on <many inputs>?ā)
automating processes ā using Excel to pull data from a SQL database and build large slide decks for supplier negotiations
pretending an Excel spreadsheet was an app ā making it pretty and interactive using VBA ( )
It usually starts between 9 and 10am. I catch up with the rest of my squad at our daily check-in and then the day is usually some combination of:
other team meetings (e.g. retrospectives, where we reflect on whatās going well/could be improved with how the team works)
answering escalations from COps (customer support)
working together with other engineers in my team (āpairingā)
gathering requirements for upcoming work, and proposing how we might meet them
working on our current sprint goals (actually writing code!)
Iāve usually exhausted all my attention by about 5.30pm. Which is convenient, because thatās when I normally start my second job, doing dinner/bath/bed for our daughter!
I havenāt done any work directly on Open Banking. I think the work our teams working on Monzo Plus and Premium are doing to integrate your other accounts in Monzo is ace. We also added the option recently to prove your income via Open Banking when applying for an overdraft, which I think is a great use ā not everyone gets paid into Monzo! (yet )
My frustrations are the wider banking industryās reluctance ā and delay ā in realising the potential. I suppose itās not a good thing if youāre used to āowningā customers and making easy profits for decades (or centuries!)
I reckon the teams that work with it would probably complain about all the unhelpful acronyms ā itās the complete opposite of what weāre used to ā¦
You can read more about Open Banking and how we use it at Monzo in our recent blog post.
Regulation is a really interesting topic. Does it slow down innovation? Probably. But I donāt think itās a bad thing. Imagine if banking wasnāt regulated ā I expect thereād be some more innovation, yes, but probably an awful lot of customer harm too
I havenāt directly worked on changes that affect large numbers of customers. But there are other ways to have impact. So I think the highest impact changes Iāve made were ones that sped up onboarding and productivity of other engineers.
When I started I was surprised how many commands I had to copy/paste into the terminal to get my laptop set up. You had to waiting for each one to complete before kicking off the next, and ā¦ it didnāt feel like a good use of my time. So I wrote a simple script to automatically run them all. And as far as I can tell, new engineers still use the same script 3.5 years later
I have not ā high on my to-do list is to go through Crypto Startup School which other, much more knowledgable, folk at Monzo recommend as a starting point
Hereās an example of how a customer might engage with some of these tools if they find themselves struggling.
Each month on the 1st some customers donāt have enough money in their account to cover the interest from their overdraft usage the month just gone. The money you owe still gets collected, taking you beyond your overdraft limit. The first thing we do is send you an in-app prompt, asking you to add money and get back within your limit. You can self-serve some things, for example telling us that youāll pay us back by a given date, e.g. when you next get paid. That stops us sending you any more messages during that time
If things are more serious, you can always chat with us at this point. Typically weāll ask you to fill out a budget assessment in your app, to help us (and you!) better understand your incomings and outgoings. It tells us what you might be able to afford to pay back over time. Hereās an example summary once youāve answered all the questions
You might then agree to go onto a plan, where youāll pay a certain amount into your account each month. Depending on how much you can afford, we might also stop charging interest at this point to help you pay back what you owe more quickly.
All of this requires internal tooling, to see someoneās borrowing with Monzo, review budget submissions, and set up or review plans!
This is just a snapshot. Thereās lots more we do to ensure good customer outcomes. As you say, one important aspect is signposting customers to other support thatās available. We also have some of this information on our website.
The worst issue Iāve faced wasnāt an outage as such. Rather, we make a mistake with some of the wording in a message we sent to some customers, which took a lot of time and effort to make right
I get really cold hands, so pockets are too useful to be filled with mushed up banana
So I guess Iāll take my chances with the browser history. Itās pretty vanilla; I think the most likely upset would be finding out what sheās getting for Christmas!
)
)
)
ā high on my to-do list is to go through 
