Might be worth unpacking some of the features in these packages:
3.9% interest on instant access savings. No upper threshold given! Although that’s still below the base rate meaning Monzo will still be making money. Depending on how you look at it, I think £1230 in savings would make back the £2.99 fee. Or, if you’re comparing it to the standard 3.4pc you’d need £7200 in savings to make up the difference.
Credit builder card sounds interesting. Flex for everyone eligible for a current account (with a low limit?) or might some still be rejected. Bit crap to have it part of the bundle, if so.
Multi-score tracker Experian and Equifax incoming alongside TransUnion? If this happens, I hope for a tab in Trends, graphs and a better way of showing/comparing the data.
Track and manage all of your accounts, all in one place. Connected accounts remain behind the paywall? Or is this signalling manual (un)connected accounts? After all, you can’t currently have all your accounts in Monzo.
Smart budgeting. This is curious. These are just standard features unless they’re developing an automated salary sorter (plausible as the US now has it), more options in Trends etc.
Automated savings through challenges…. I’m hoping this means that the IFTTT connection won’t be necessary for things like the savings challenges. Native savings challenges incoming? Otherwise it’s just a standard feature - which is rapidly being paywalled by ifttt themselves. Unless Monzo have agreed with Ifttt that they’ll be free for paid customers?
…and moving money to earn interest when you don’t need it. Could this be an interest bearing Bills pot that avoids the issues of the savings pot (pay bills from it, schedule withdrawals etc)?
5% on roundups. Great! If you can’t beat them, then… (Although why not beat them with 5.5%?)
Personalised spend insights and Targets no paywalling Targets (still poorly named) please!
I’d be tempted by the Max Perks account… but ONLY if I could have it on my joint account, you know, the one that I actually use for everything. Right now, I have almost that exact same Perk set on a Lloyds JOINT account that we only set up so that we can get the perk set, and we use it for several k a month of traffic that Monzo’s missing out on having the money on hand for. If Monzo would offer it on Joint, we’d close the Lloyds account in a heartbeat and move back the bills that we pay out of it to keep it active.
Come on Monzo, put these options on joint accounts, not just on personal ones.
Edit, I was a premium subscrber for years until the Lloyds perks changed to include roadside recovery, now I’ve cancelled it to move the perk account across to them, with the added bonus that it all covers both of us, not just me.
Well that’s just a choice made by you, as all that money could still go to monzo and you just send the £21 to Lloyds every month instead, so it’s not really a valid point to not use monzo at this time.
Oh, we still use Monzo for most of our banking, your app and general service are just so much better (in my opinion) than anything else I’ve seen. I wish I could still subscribe to a premium account with Monzo, since I’d rather you had the money than Lloyds, but sadly, I can’t afford to do both, and can’t justify not using the one that gives us so much more for the price.
The traffic we put through Lloyds is to mitigate the costs there (they give a discount based on usage)
Club Lloyds Platinum. The Club portion requires a certain number of direct debits per month to reduce the fee, the Platinum portion requires a certain amount of money to pass through the account each month to reduce the fee.
I found I wasn’t quite sure if my data would be that useful since there were a lot of unknowns.
For a start, the custom categories and virtual cards weren’t mentioned at all. Those are both key to me so without them I probably wouldn’t buy any, but I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to assume they were included or if they might be thinking of making them core/free features anyway?
And like some others have mentioned, a Railcard would be great, but there doesn’t currently exist one I am eligible for.
The only one I could really with confidence say I’d pick, assuming it still comes with the app features of existing plus, was the Disney plus, since I already subscribe so an extra £3 a month for that would be a no brainer. But it felt kinda weird picking it as, overall, I’m a person who prefers to pay for banking features and/or more ethical banking rather than random unrelated perks.
