📰 Monzo's Tom Blomfield on cutting the crap from financial services

This interview was pretty wide-ranging, and maybe I was too vague at the time!

We’ve got a clear goal - we want Monzo to be a financial control centre for a billion people around the world. But the path to getting there is not set in stone. We tend to be quite iterative, so making cast-iron promises about the future is frankly impossible.

If you’d have asked me two years ago whether I could guarantee we’d still be called “Mondo” today, I’d have probably said yes. And I would have been wrong!

By the end of 2017, we’re currently forecasting that less than 10% of our deposits will be loaned out. But as that number is currently 0%, it’s hard to say for sure. We break-even if we lend out about 20% of our deposits, which I guess we’ll aim for some time in 2018 or 2019.

I’ve said before that I think FX will tend towards zero cost to the consumer over time, and I still believe that. There’s very little inherent cost in it, and the large banks are ripping off customers.

The exception is foreign ATM withdrawals, which cost Monzo around 2.5% for any withdrawal outside of the EU. So if you take out £200 in India, that one withdrawal costs Monzo £5. We offer it to our customers for free. So you can see how those costs add up over time.

So for now, if you’d like to help Monzo out, please do try to pay in-store with your card, rather than using ATMs, where possible :slight_smile:

(or contactless, in restaurants, online etc, etc. Just not ATMs! They’re very costly)

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