Number of Monzo Users

Thanks Colin! I’ll update the spreadsheet :slight_smile:

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@anon44204028 Yep! @tom said at the open office session in early-mid-December that they’d anticipated handing out 4k-5k cards total, and had now handed out over 80k cards and were handing out more than 4k-5k per month!

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Activation date - 12/04/16

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Thanks Aeroc, we need as much data as possible for the beginning of 2016 :slight_smile:

It looks whatever Monzo did in the first couple of weeks of April was particularly effective, in terms of getting new users to signup :eyes:

Screenshots taken from the graphs in the document from this post.

I’m guessing that this is due to the launch of the beta program (on the 17th March). There would have been a delay before users were able to activate their cards & the user numbers jumped, while Monzo worked to send out cards after the increased demand. But it’s still difficult to draw accurate conclusions, without having more data from around this time.

Just to mention, if I like (:heart:) a user’s comment - which contains user number + activation date - in this thread, then I’ve updated the spreadsheet. I won’t post a thank you each time, to avoid swamping the topic.

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Interesting detective work as always @alexs :mag: !

I guess there is no external way for us to look at things like user engagement/level of activity/spend as thats what you really want to correlate against signup (plus level of references) if we are looking at growth of the product though.

This is an interesting area though - this is something where Monzo would definitely have the real stats and be paying close attention to them - im guessing its something they dont want to make explicitly available externally? In which case would they be happy with this recreation? (Im guessing its something competitors/commentators could be doing themselves anyway though)

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Thanks, I’m glad you find this interesting too :slight_smile:

Exactly, unfortunately, I don’t think this those other numbers are available. The only other stat that I have, for future reference, is Monzo was seeing about £700k of spend per day on average, at the start of December which is obviously just under £100k of daily spend per 10k users.
So they’ve obviously come a long way, since they celebrated processing a total of £20m of spend back in August, when they had about 34k users :tada: But we’d need to know how that figure changes in the future / has changed, in order to draw any conclusions about useage.

I’m guessing they don’t want to either. As I’m sure you’ve seen, Fintech startups (that’re privately held companies & funded by investors) are generally pretty secretive about these kinds of figures & I wouldn’t expect Monzo to be any different unfortunately, even though they are being open with pretty much every other aspect of their business. I think that’s fair enough.

I don’t think they mind this tracking though (I did give this some thought before creating the graph though), as this single piece of information isn’t really meaningful - in theory there could be 100k users signed up & only 1 user who still uses their card…
Plus users obviously like to show that they were early adopters, by sharing their user number & the media like to quote the figure so I think Monzo will want to keep sharing it & I’m sure they considered the implications before they started sharing the figure.

As you say, I’m sure competitors have done something similar already ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ some of the media could do a better job of researching this figure before they publish it though :stuck_out_tongue:

I guess against that curve there is also user application (to join the queue) vs user onboarding (when they become a ‘user’ and tweet it out) - the onboarding could actually be rate limited by how quickly monzo can process people on the queue (as in how quickly can they issue the prepaid cards). I wonder whether we can tell from the data whether thats the case or not (would have to have a way of looking at the queue size over time)

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I’d definitely be interested to see the size of the queue over time & there’s been plenty of posts in the community from users saying “there’s x users in front of me in the queue” + “how long will I have to wait” etc.

That figure could be a little bit wooly though because users still have to activate their account once they reach the top of the queue :sheep:

So if Monzo took a long time to get through the queue, I assume the user will be less likely to activate their card because they’ve forgotten why they signed up / aren’t as excited, for example. And some users wait until payday to activate their card which means that there would be drops in the size of the queue at the end of each month.

Obviously the same issues apply to my User Account Activation per Day Trend graph :arrow_up:

I guess those issues will average out over time…

@alexs Thanks for all this - activation rates are super interesting! Do you know if there is anywhere we can find out about the churn rate for users? Obviously tons of new users signing up is great but I’d love to see how many of those use keep using Monzo on, say, a weekly basis.

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I’d love to know that too but I don’t know of a way to find that figure out & I have a feeling that’s one of the numbers that Monzo won’t want to share :wink:

If they do, I’ll definitely post it here though!

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Yeah I’d imagine so too! Thought it might be worth asking in case you knew anything though :slight_smile:

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Completely anecdotal, but once people are fully established users, I would expect the churn rate to be near-zero. Getting people to become established users is difficult though - I would expect that to be a little less than 50% of card activations.

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@billinghamj That is what I would have assumed as well - the challenge I imagine is just to get users into the habit of using Monzo

When it comes to churn, I wouldn’t expect a lot of users to cut up their card or switch to a competitor (unless they need a mortgage & can put up with a really badly designed app, in which case, they could switch to Atom).

My main concern is the users who sign up to check Monzo out & then end up only using it for discretionary spend / travel etc. in other words, infrequently because they’re still using relying on the bank which provides their current account, particularly if they’re earning reward points from credit cards.

But having said that, it’s still early days & Monzo aren’t expecting to be making a profit at this point so I don’t think it’s a major problem if user engagement isn’t that high (although it is interesting to know). What really matters in my opinion, is useage after the current accounts launch, as that’s when users will (hopefully) switch to using Monzo as their main bank :pray:

Just to mention, I’m not aware of any of Monzo’s competitors sharing useage metrics either so even if we did have the figures, we wouldn’t have a benchmark against - if you have any, please share them!

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I got my “skip the queue” investor email on the 4th of April and immediately ordered my card.

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Thanks Dan :slightly_smiling_face: do you remember when it arrived & you linked your card to the app by any chance?

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Yeah, I took photos fortunately! :smile: … My card arrived on the 6th of April and I linked the card on the same day.

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Throwing my data point in.

User #741.
Registered 19th of January, 2015 at 18:45 :wink:

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Again, following on from @NamesKieran’s comment Tom mentioned in the recent London Fintech podcast that Monzo’s set

in order to become “significant”. I’m guessing that Tom’s referring to Monzo’s influence on the market as a whole there.

My prediction is that they’ll get to 1m users by the end of 2017 :crystal_ball:

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Especially if they can break into the American market before the end of 2017.

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