Busted
I never claimed the AI would give me sensible questions
Love these answers Thanks for joining the AMA, it’s been super interesting!
Am I allowed to ask a question?
Would love to hear from folks about where they would see ML being useful for Monzo & our customers. Ideas welcome! Are there any other apps / products that you think are smashing it with ML?
@Neal has turned the table on us
Maybe an obvious one, but Apple.
When you pull down, you get Siri suggestions and it’s very good!
First thing in the morning it always shows the radio app that I use and the VPN Authenticator that I need.
Now it’s showing things that I use throughout the day and by this evening, Teams will go and be replaced with something else.
Agree with this. I use WhatsApp every day and I’ve literally never not accessed it from siri suggestions, same for quite a few of my regular apps actually.
Separately, @BritishLibrary’s use of GPT-2 really brought a smile to my face. Love this forum and all of the geekery within.
I would love love love to see AI drive more contextual awareness in the app. I’m not sure the level of it already, but smarter Auto-categorisation based on factors beyond the Merchant would be so helpful to me
Any patterns in my spending that can prompt an auto category - e.g. there’s a place I buy coffee from regularly, usually in the morning, and I categorise it as Coffee.
Sometimes though I have lunch there - the lunch cost would be at a different time of day, and usually different spend amount - and I’d categorise that differently.
If there’s a way to look back through spend patterns to do categorisations on the fly, that would be superb.
There’s similar niggles I have with how the app presents certain menus - which could be more context aware if nothing else. (e.g. the Move Money between accounts screen, If I have one account with £10 and another with £10,000 (I wish…) - making an educated guess at the direction I want to move money would be great, rather than the default always being “move money into the account I’ve accessed this menu from”.
Lastly, the Help Section is I think the thing that would benefit the most from some AI tools - not sure if machine learning is the right thing per-se, but I think there could be a great way to guide a user through the help articles in a cleverer way than present
Hey Neal
Thanks so much for taking the time to answer questions!
In response to yours, I’m not really sure that I know what ML is. It feels like one of those terms that get a bit buzzy and zeitgeisty for a bit and therefore a bit meaningless. In that sense, I suppose the best ML stuff for Monzo is stuff that doesn’t feel like ML - and adds a bit of gloss or value for the customer.
Off the top of my head, here are some potential candidates:
-
Smarter category categorisation: I go to my work canteen for breakfast, lunch and snacks. I categorise these separately but manually. I wonder whether learning times and amounts might help to do that automagically?
-
Better support experience. I’m usually dead set against dumb chat bots. But I wonder if you could plunder support chats and the content on here to suggest answers up front? I’m on record as being grumpy with Monzo hiding the chat button (making the primary support channel for customers difficult to find is not okay), but perhaps ML could help reallocate queries to specialist queues? (Or give front line COps who, through presumably no fault of their own, don’t really seem to understand the product all that well, a summary of the issue the customer is talking about).
-
Better Summary. This is probably basic data stuff rather than ML (?) but comparisons of spend across periods, explanations for changes, unique insights (tell me how much I spend on Christmas presents each year so I can cut back/plan), Fitbit-eque comparator cohorts (do I spend more or less than men my age? Are my bills more or less than those with comparator properties/households…?)
-
Identity! I had a great experience the other day where someone asked me to take a selfie with ID and send it through email. I said no (because that’s a silly thing to do, send identity documents and your biometrics in the clear) but then I could identify with one fingerprint in the app. Are there other things you could do to seemlessly assure yourself that the person using the app is the authorised user (perhaps on usage patterns)? A good place to start would be permissions for high-value transfers (like mortgages) which are painful to the point that most people savvy about it probably won’t even try to use Monzo for that… (I’d also like to see a "login in / authenticate with Monzo service for third parties, but one thing at a time…).
I’m sure I’ll think of more! Do feel free to ping me if you have questions.
As for other companies, to end where I began I don’t think I really know what ML is, or could identify where it’s being used. If anything comes to mind, it’s probably a bad example but I’ll let you know!
Oh this would be brilliant!
@Neal we’d love your thoughts on the general tech advancements, short and long term risk, and what this could mean for Monzo*.
*I have a theory that you could run first line support off of a well trained LLM then save the humans for more thoughtful, involved responses.
And how about text based Trends with graphics dynamically generated by the AI on the back of things like “calculate my personal inflation rate for spending over the last five years and plot it against my rate of pay increase”. Or “which merchants have I spent the most at over the last year?” Or “I need to save £100 a month, recommend some discretionary spend that I could stop to fund that”.