So has anyone else noticed the student offer this year?
https://www.o2.co.uk/studentoffer
My thoughts are that it’s a good idea (essentially O2 giving £30 cashback) and getting students to use monzo.
However, I think it may be a bit tricky for monzo to compete with the £1500-2000 interest free overdraft offered by the mainstream banks, plus obviously they’d need another bank account to sign up for the O2 deal anyway.
Ha…O2 offering a Monzo card, yet don’t allow the Monzo sort-code/account number on their site…
Bit ironic considering they still haven’t sorted out monzo CA acceptance 
Dammit… They’ve updated their site, the sort-code and account are supported
YES … I had to speak to 5 different people for at least an hour n half to switch my DD to Monzo —
By the way, all those people waiting in a queue for a Monzo card and O2 can just simply offer just like that 
So I wonder how this will play out what with o2 customers now seemingly getting cards before those that have been waiting in the queue for a while??
Also how are they doing this?
From a business point of view I think it could be a good way to compete for both businesses and it gets Monzo into the hands of students who are typically young individuals with disposable income and who are possibly less tied to a particular bank.
For Monzo they are getting a new user with some money in their account.
For O2 its a way to compete with EE (now owned by BT) who like BT are offering prepaid cards to their customers as a cashback bonus, the advantage being that all of the effort is handed to monzo so its probably much less complex to administer and of course you can (and should) reload the cards unlike with BT/EE.
I approve
To activate it, you go to the monzo site (https://monzo.com/o2/) so they must have partnered up to do this.
I feel it’s bit unfair to people registered to be in a queue and willing to deposit £100 (I know you can take out as soon as you get your card)
But then so is having a big thread on here with basically anyone getting a golden ticket (I posted about this the other day) rather than just sharing them out with your mates.
Tbh the wait isn’t particularly long at the moment anyway is it? Feel free to correct me
Monzo has quite a few arrangements with promoters of their brand like this, it increases the likelihood of a user signing up which seems like a good idea, considering the cost that’s involved in the promotion.
Would you consider this more unfair than someone taking a golden ticket from this thread?
I for one think its a great bit of targeted marketing, basically everyone wins (Monzo, O2 and most importantly the student) and it gets the cards into a fantastic target market, I honestly wish I had a monzo card when I was an undergrad student it would have made budgeting so much easier.
Though thinking about it maybe ignorance was bliss, I’m not sure I want to know how much I spent on booze and takeaways 
Really unhappy to see Monzo partnered with such scammers.
Can you elaborate on that? I’m sure a lot of us have companies we’ve had bad experiences with, but branding them “scammers” without really explaining your reasoning doesn’t give anyone else much to go on.
Good to see Monzo patterning up with a instantly recognisable brand, and can only help Monzo get out their and be a recognisable brand too
Why are o2 scammers, let’s see proof not just some slanderous comment
Their business model is basically let’s sweet talk people into 12 month contracts (because they’re so bad everyone would leave if it wasn’t for contracts) on a plan that’s got way more data than you need and once you’re locked in well good luck - the customer service is awful and the stack is almost as old as legacy banks (zero innovation). Customer service is outsourced to overseas slaves who couldn’t care less (understandable considering their pay and working conditions).
Their plans are designed so you can’t upgrade to a more expensive plan on purpose as a scare tactic, so this can be used in store to scare people into buying a more expensive plan fearing they’d run out of data later on and be stuck with a plan with not enough data for 12 months. If you don’t call this a scam I’m not sure what is.
Finally in store when a customer comes in the salespeople are told to “check their account” to see if they’re out of contract and if so to “upgrade” them to the same plan over again just to lock them in for another 24 months, even though the customer originally came in for a totally unrelated issue. The excuse for this is that the new plan might be like 1£ cheaper but obviously the real reason is to lock them in again.
This link sums it up quite well.
Edit: I have been told the contracts were for 12 months (honestly can’t remember) so for the sake of being fair I’m editing the post. 
I probably wouldn’t call them scammers per se but their contracts are notoriously hard to get out of- my housemate was also charged twice for her plan and it took months to get a refund sorted. Their customer service isn’t great online/ in person either.
I was customer service (well more specifically technical advisor) in person and the truth is the people are great but the tools we are given are awful, so in-store the only thing we can do (and should do) is to sign up or “upgrade” people, anything else has to be done over the phone or online as the rubbish in-store systems don’t allow it.
Last time I was there the in-store system was running Windows XP, Internet Exporer 7, Flash and Java, and had a credit card reader on it to easily type in card numbers (used for credit checks?). Not really secure either, though lately they’ve upgraded to Windows POSReady, but I bet the vulnerable Flash and Java are still there.
Personally having been with Orange, Three, etc they all as bad as each other