Number of Monzo Users

Monzo Chat
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That doesn’t look quite right! :laughing:

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It’s not!

:stuck_out_tongue:

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The actual user numbers for the 16th may have been compiled after the forecast on the 17th, i.e. figures provided on the 18th for 2 days back

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… D’oh. Sorry!

(reaching char req)

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Out of interest, is anyone aware of a strategy for the quantity of users Monzo want to onboard at the pre-paid card stage? Or is it simply ‘as quickly and as many as possible’?

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@eplaskow Yep! To put simply, as many as we possibly can :slightly_smiling_face:

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Just to share a bit more of the backstory :classical_building: - Tom’s said that they were only expecting to sign up a few thousand users at the most, before the launch of the ‘full bank’ & current accounts. And my guess is that this is what Starling (the most similar ‘challenger’ bank to Monzo in terms of the business model, who have taken a very secretive approach, has ended up with).

But a combination of being open (community, blog posts, office open days, presentations), the hot coral card, p2p payments creating a network effect, a strong fintech scene, using the right tone in their content / social media etc. etc. etc. has meant that there’s been far more interest than expected which is how Monzo’s ended up with so many more users.

So following on from Naji’s comment, this has led to Monzo proactively stepping up their sales / marketing efforts, culminating in the week long Old Street shopping event / marketing campaign at the end of this year -

:movie_camera: :arrow_down:

& also raising more money from investors, to help pay for the increased operating costs & I would guess to also fund more marketing.

The plan for next year is for Monzo to double the size of their team but their target will be to increase the number of Monzo users at least several times over. Obviously rapid growth in terms of users is one of the key signals that investors are looking for :rocket:

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If I remember rightly they got 16 times the number of card holders they had estimated for the beta

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FWIW one of my Golden Tickets has just been used yesterday for user 84588

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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:

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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…

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@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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