Monzonaut AMA - Theo - Borrowing Data Scientist

Would you rather have fingers for toes or toes for fingers?

If you were to leave Monzo, what’s something that they do, that you’d want to take with you into another role?

2 Likes

:smirk:

3 Likes

I’m going to need a new question!

1 Like

developing our decisioning strategies

It’s important to do good decisioning so that you don’t get frauded, I guess… :thinking:

Can you fix the exclude from summary toggle when you make a loan repayment? It’s not worked in the 2 years I’ve had my loan

If you could change 1 thing to improve the customer experience for customers borrowing from Monzo, what would it be? Apart from fixing that toggle of course

4 Likes

Do overdraft rates change or are you stuck with the same rate you are given when you apply for one in the first place?

If no, then would it be something Monzo will ever consider doing?

If yes, how many people get their rates changed?

1 Like

There are different overdraft rates :open_mouth:

Is it the same as loans: 19%, 29% and 39%?

Those are the overdraft rates. I’m pretty sure they’re not the loan rates

Yep, just checked, they are not the loan rates which start at 7.2%

Nevermind, I sometimes type faster than I can think :laughing: :see_no_evil:

Found the page on overdrafts: https://monzo.com/i/overdrafts/

1 Like

Do you think there’s ever been twins that their parents have got them confused as babies and they’ve ended up swapping names?

1 Like

eek - so many great and tough questions! Will start going through a few slowly today :slight_smile:

Haha - I had a bet with @AlanDoe and @AdamLittle that this would be the first question asked!

I think you probably know my answer already… We’ve got a lot of exciting things coming this year in Borrowing, but afraid I can’t talk about any new products until we’re ready to test them with you and other customers.

Sorry, bit of a boring answer I know!

13 Likes

You know you’ll be our favourite if you tell us

Or we can just wait for Dan to slip up again

4 Likes

These are both things on the potential roadmap for H2 (along with some other things mentioned in other threads on the forum such as allowing you to pay a loan from a bills pot). We’re currently going through our H2 roadmap planning to decide which things we’ll do first since we can’t build everything at the same time :frowning_face:

I think you should see at least one nice change on the loans side in the next 6 months though :crossed_fingers: Can’t be sure what it’ll be though (Note our H2 year runs September - Feb to align with our financial year)

2 Likes

When will you be ready to test them with @davidwalton and other customers?

Also, if you could improve one aspect of Monzo, what would it be, and why?

2 Likes

Thank you for such a detailed timescale. Im really excited to see these implemented!

This will be a little bit of a longer one. In short, right now, it isn’t. This was a decision made right at the start of overdrafts (back in 2018) and it has come up a few times since (eg. when we discussed the question below, which i’ll get on to) and i think it comes back to how you see pots. Just how “separate” are pots? This will probably be answered differently by different people but I’ll try give a few examples that favour the current implementation and informed the decision back in 2018:

  • If you have two accounts, your Barclays account and your Monzo account and you use Monzo for your spending so you have £500 in Monzo and -£250 in Barclays. You wouldn’t expect Barclays not to charge you for your overdraft usage. You can micro-manage this situation if you want in the same way to can micro-manage your Monzo pot - Monzo current account situation so you’re not paying interest but most people won’t do this because either they’re not that bothered or they want to keep that separation of money.
  • The argument on the above might be that it’s with different companies but here’s another example. You have £2,000 in your Monzo current account and a £2,000 loan with Monzo. How much interest do you expect to be charged on your loan? I’d expect almost everyone to say they’re changed on the £2,000. So net, your not in debt with Monzo but you’re still paying interest. This is your choice to keep your money separate. You could have the money in your current account offset the loan but this is a different product (an offset loan) which would require a different credit agreement and would likely be priced differently to take into account this interaction.

Monzo will always send you a notification if you enter your overdraft so you can easily move money from a pot if you want to. This isn’t something customers really ask for/ question (through chat/ complaints/ etc.) compared to loan extensions which customers do reach out to us about quite a lot, from the data we can see it would have a reasonably small impact, and it would also take a fair chunk of time to change from a technical perspective so even if we were thinking about it - it would be extremely low on the priority list.

So the discussions around this is something that I was involved in. We’ve gone with an option at the simpler end of potential solutions and I’ve gota say I think it’s really cool and gives customers the flexibility to use their pot in a way they want to use it. The solution also tested really well in user research :slight_smile:

8 Likes

Doesn’t how you pay interest contradict this though?

As a Plustomer you’ll pay me interest upto £2,000, no matter which pot its in.

7 Likes

Thanks for the answers, Theo! :raised_hands:

This is interesting! I agree that most people would say that, but that’s because they’re used to a traditional banking paradigm. And that’s where user research can sometimes fail: if you ask horse riders what they want you get a faster horse, rather than the motor car… Sometimes it takes a risk to rethink things to make them better. (But then user test the prototype, obviously!)

I’m super excited for this - keen to see what you’ve come up with!

(I also offer myself for testing purposes :joy:)

2 Likes

Exactly this. Some rethinking, reimagining, and reinventing the way credit and debt works would be awesome, and is something I see as the next step forwards with fintech.

This would be a great discussion, but I wouldn’t want to sidetrack the AMA with that. Perhaps it calls for reviving one of your old threads on this @Peter_G? Hopefully Theo will chime in on that too.

2 Likes

Firstly, thank you for the detailed answer! And I note you say it would be very low down even if it were to ever change, so I won’t hold out hope.

But my follow up point/question to this is that pots aren’t loans. If I put £200 in my pot, and my ‘main’ balance goes negative I am still not borrowing money from Monzo.

With the loan, I obviously have at one point literally borrowed money from Monzo, and then, as you rightly say, can choose to pay it off more quickly or slowly. So I’m not seeing the equivalence?

And I just think it’s a shame as pots are such a fantastic feature, but at points in a month/my life, I can either basically pay to use them (by incurring overdraft fees) and keep my money nicely organised…or not use them :slightly_frowning_face:

I’ve gotta say also, I’m intrigued as to what this is… to somehow be flexible and cool, but be different to the current setup? And still keep the current setup for normal pots as is.

3 Likes