Coincidentally went to one of the above after my booster today. The other I wouldn’t touch with a barge pole
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Neither for me also. I have a Greggs near-ish to me but it’s not worth travelling to. There are no Prets near me at all 
I hope this isn’t going to be extremely London centric like most things 
Another reason why the personalised spending report was nice.
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Just checked back on the Monzo Twitter. It’s… quite something
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Yep we’ve looked at other regions, not just London. We’ve also looked at things like how different age demographics spent 
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I’ve just seen Monzo’s post of this on Tiktok (why hello, fellow kids)
Lots of comments about “how could you use my data like this”….
Which I find hilarious.
Shame Monzo couldn’t do both. Especially since with open banking all my spend can be caught there.
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So much opportunity squandered. Would have been a lovely viral Plus thing, too.
As a Pluser the YIM lost a bit as last year it said I spent £20 on groceries because I forgot to put something into #BigShop and my Shopping was limited because it didn’t see my #Amazon category.
I understand to build it out for individuals might be tougher but if you stripped it back a level, leave that bit out. Tell me how much I spent at my top 3 retailers, how many times a day I used my card/contactless %, what the most common custom categories are.
There’s lots that could be done still. Seems a shame to lose it.
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You could also have some sections which would show your “how you’ve spent with Monzo” and others which would be “all spending”.
If anything, Plus just adds extra opportunity for things you could do with the huge bucket of “extra data” for other accounts as well as all the usual Monzo data. I accept the fact that you couldn’t possibly do a beautiful report with maps and merchant data for all the connected accounts, as the quality of some of that data from other banks would be too poor, but you could still do some interesting insights, as you say. Open Banking aggregators like Emma already manage it, so it’s not an insurmountable problem.
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Surprised by this decision, it always seemed like one of Monzo’s USPs, and this was actually my first intro to Monzo (via friends sharing on Twitter). It has surely contributed a huge amount to brand recognition, and resulted in new customers.
I’m sure there’s a lot of work involved, but seems very much worth it, especially as the alternative version seems to have virtually no engagement in comparison.
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I suspect it’s the effort and labour required to maintain and update the merchant data enrichment. Last year, as an outsider, looked like support support folks had been doing crunch to get it all done, and even then, the merchant data still wasn’t good enough.
This sort of stuff is much easier to do, and I think, far more interesting. My only issue is execution seems very amateurish and not a good look, but perhaps that’s in tune with their audience? Who knows? But it looks like they’re being designed by a 5 year old who spent 5 minutes on it. Almost like they grabbed a few images off google and spent a few minutes in MS paint with fill tool. The whole thing is 
.
Would love to see my own trends too though.
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Is suspect the same thing.
It’s the age-old debate about the feasibility of merchant data and how to keep it updated, really.
I do think that automated crowdsourcing is probably the answer (as Emma do for merchant logos) but this only goes so far as you can’t use it to correct maps without manual intervention, or to tidy up merchant names when they are formatted completely incorrectly.
Edit to add further thoughts:
Also, that doesn’t even account for all the issues caused by franchisees using different trading names on their terminals, businesses that may be running inconsistent software versions (and reporting different merchant names as a result) or having to link various “duplicate” merchants together to get an accurate picture of spending.
J Sainsbury, Sainsburys and Sainsbury’s should all report as the same shop, for example, as should John Lewis and John Lewis & Partners. Amazon is also sometimes Amazon, sometimes Amazon Marketplace, and sometimes something like Amazon EU Sarl. Those are just the examples I could think of immediately, but there are hundreds of cases of things like this.
That said, I would assume that work to improve merchant data is going to be needed anyway, as others have said in this thread, for Trends to work properly. So if you already need to clean up the data for that, it’s a shame not to also do the classic Year In Monzo. It’s a great marketing opportunity for social media, but it is also a good way to build customer loyalty as customers enjoy seeing the data - and since you’ve done in multiple times before, it’s become expected, like Spotify Wrapped, so it is going to disappoint some by not being there this year.
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I was looking forward to my #YearInMonzo.
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Me too, is always a fun thing to compare with friends. Definitely brought a few people to Monzo with it
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All hail the Cheese & Onion Pasty!
Nice
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Grim 
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Somewhere, deep in Monzo Towers, and while a single tear falls down their face, a special projects team is slowly ripping up the contract they were poised to sign with Pret as anchor member of relaunched Monzo Points.
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I think I saw on Twitter that the blue line was skincare
Steak Bake, surely?
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Why does steak rhyme with stake and bake, and not with streak and teak?
English must be bloody awful to learn as a second language. I’m currently learning Welsh, and although every word is seemingly 24 letters long with no vowels, once you understand the phonetics, it’s actually pretty rigid.
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