Monzonaut AMA - Tim - Senior Backend Engineer

[AlanDoe (Alan)]

After last week’s huge AMA we’ve got yet another one with Community favourite @tjvr

As you may already know, Tim is a Senior Backend Engineer within our Paid Team. He’s been with the rocket ship Monzo for 3 years 9 months and 24 days

During those years he’s worked on quite a few of the features we all love including:

• Stripe topups
• CASS
• Summary
• Joint Accounts
• Bill Splitting
• Shared Tabs

Tim is going to answer as many questions as he can between now and Friday so feel free to pick his brains

[tjvr (Tim)]

[Rat_au_van (Em)]

When are credit pots launching?

When is pay from a pot launching?

What is your favourite flavour of jam?

[mycl (Michael Leung)]

What’s your favourite train?

[davidwalton (Award Winning Hot Coral Analyst)]

ooohh Joint Account experience…

Where do I start

[rubendura (Rubén Durá Tarí)]

When are you joining us in the Cards Squad?

[tjvr (Tim)]

@Rat_au_van

When are credit pots launching?

I don’t work on a lending team, so I’ve never heard of them I’m afraid!

Pay from a pot? Sounds like a great idea! I’ll share your suggestion with my team

Favourite flavour of jam? Now that’s a real question. It depends what mood I’m in: some days are strawberry, some are apricot. Marmalade days are the best days.

[tjvr (Tim)]

@mycl

What’s your favourite train?

I do like the Class 47: https://twitter.com/blob8108/status/1421773008679624708

But I’m hoping to get a Class 08 this week. They’re so smol!

[tjvr (Tim)]

@davidwalton

ooohh Joint Account experience…

Joint Accounts were one of my favouritest projects ever. Still have fond memories of accidentally testing joint notifications…

[tjvr (Tim)]

I’m very happy where I am currently, thanks, keeping a safe distance from Mastercard. I do enjoy getting to work on projects like Virtual Cards and [redacted], though!

Thanks for all your help with the latter, btw

[davidwalton (Award Winning Hot Coral Analyst)]

Is there any work to bring custom categories to Joint Accounts, so Trends can work properly when a JA is involved? I understand this isn’t an easy one, as there are 2 people involved (do they both have to pay for Plus/Premium on their Personal accounts, or can both access custom cartegories on the JA if one user has Plus/Premium on their Personal account?)

There are a lot of nicey-nicey features that were left out of Joint Accounts when compared to Personal accounts - is there any development going on in the background or is JA development now stagnant?

[Revels]

Please can you add my joint account to my google exports spreadsheet? Thanks!

[tjvr (Tim)]

@davidwalton

Is there any work to bring custom categories to Joint Accounts

This is a tough one. I can’t speak to what we’ll prioritise, but I can give some flavour as to why it’s tricky. I recently wrote a 1000-word document exploring the issue (with diagrams!):

The core of the problem is that there are a couple of competing constraints:

• You and your partner need to see the same set of categories on the joint account, since, well, the transactions are shared.
• We want you to have a shared set of categories across your personal and joint accounts, so that Trends can provide an overviewing of your spending across all your accounts. (We don’t want your personal “Coffee” category and your joint “Coffee” category showing up separately!)

There are a few different ways to solve this, and we’re exploring a few of them. And I don’t know how it would work with Monzo Plus, either. But hopefully that sheds a little insight as to how we’re thinking about this.

Trust me, I want this too—I only use my joint account

[Drew58 (Drew - Joint account feature parity please Monzo)]

So basically both members of a joint account need plus or premium and the same categories created for this to work on joint accounts at Monzo?

[Alexxxxx (>50 categories pls)]

@tjvr

We want you to have a shared set of categories across your personal and joint accounts, so that Trends can provide an overviewing of your spending across all your accounts. (We don’t want your personal “Coffee” category and your joint “Coffee” category showing up separately!)

Sounds like we might need more than 50 custom categories if joint account peeps would need to share the same list…

[tjvr (Tim)]

I wouldn’t want you to draw any conclusions from my message above about how it will work; we don’t know yet how it will work! I was just trying to demonstrate the sort of issues we’re thinking about

[Ordog]

@tjvr

[N26throwaway (Sir Tom MacMonier)]

Hello @Peter_G impersonator!

1. Are you the guy responsible for removing for Apple Pay from Monzo.me?

2. Can you add it back pls? (I promise I won’t abuse it this time!)

3. If you could improve one aspect of Monzo, what would it be, and why?

4. in the thread on Trends, someone from Monzo mentioned their bills were auto added to a shared tab. I can’t seem to find this option in Monzo so how is this actually done? IFTTT? If it relies on IFTTT could this not be something the app itself could handle in the future? Would be awesome.

ETA: Found the post referenced in question 4 for context:

@jackcully

Now, my flow looks like this:

• I Salary Sort money into my ‘House Bills’ Pot when I’m paid – enough to cover the cost of all the bills
• The bills are paid from that Pot, and added to our Shared Tab automatically
• My housemates pay me back via the Shared Tab

[ndrw]

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

[Alexxxxx (>50 categories pls)]

What is the Paid Team?

I note that you and a lot of others have worked in a number of teams. Is that formalised at all, in terms of moving people around every X months to get experience across the firm, or does it just happen naturally as a part of the way Monzo is structured? Or both/something else entirely?

Number one feature you’d like to see in Monzo? Real and plausible or completely fantastical.