Hi Guys - one of the many partnerships we’re exploring is with Nutmeg.
Nutmeg is an online investment management service who build and manage intelligent portfolios, ISAs and Pensions. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on:
Does anyone use Nutmeg today and if so, how is the experience for you?
If you don’t use Nutmeg today, do you have opinions on it?
Would you be interested in Monzo building an integration with Nutmeg in the future - it might look like this:
Pull in your investment / portfolio information into Monzo so you can see it all in one place
[After we rollout current accounts] Have the option to easily move some of your money into Nutmeg to invest it
What other services similar to Nutmeg (e.g. investment and savings products) would you be interested in Monzo building an integration with in the future?
Thanks as always for all the time you guys give in providing great feedback!
I see mentions of Nutmeg in and around this forum. They seem like a fairly cool company, offering rather intuitive investment with the upside of it being that you just put money in and set it chugging - And the downside (IMO) being that you don’t get 100% of the control of where your money is invested, there’s just a low / med / high risk slider.
And then Nutmeg take their fees off the top, monthly.
I would consider signing up if it was super easy to access via Monzo, but otherwise it might just be left alone by me.
I like the idea of it, however I feel like it detracts from the ultra-casual investor through its requirement of a £500 minimum.
I use Moneybox (arguably the fees are higher than I’d like) just to be able to stick in the occasional £20 or £50 and keep it ticking over so that would be something I’d like to see (appreciate there is a big long thread about such integration).
I’d probably give it a go if there was a smaller minimum, but don’t necessarily want to tie up that much capital without being able to have a play with it first. I’d rather do something like Zopa or similar.
Moneybox is another ‘casual’ investment platform, you can start saving with spare change. Something I’ve looked at but not looked into all of the specifics of (yet). Could be worth looking into also.
I currently use Wealthify. Very similar but you can invest from £1 so it’s open to a wider range of customers. Would love to see an integration for it.
This is a not a criticism of Sacha at all, it applies to lots of users but I thought I’d quickly point out how useful it is if you share a link to the service you’re mentioning in a topic like this.
I have been using moneyfarm for the past week. I’ve made about a pound. There are no fees up to £10,000 which is nice and a minimum deposit of £1 and doesn’t cost to withdraw out.
I use a few of these including Moneybox but my favourite two are Plum and Chip - neither of which have I seen mentioned previously.
Plum works through Facebook Messenger and uses an algorithm to make a saving for you each week. You can then invest these savings with Ratesetter for between 2% and 3%.
Chip runs through its own app, but works in a similar way. If you accept someone’s referral code or invite others yourself you get an additional 1% up to a maximum of 5% on your savings.
I use nutmeg and really like it - I actually really like that its a managed investment as their performance has been much better than my own attempts at investing (hopefully other than my monzo investment which I have high hopes for)
Their interface is really nice and their monthly communications are very helpful (including video reviews explaining their investment choices). Their comms have actually nudged me towards investing more earlier in the year as opposed to splitting it over months.
Perhaps controversially what I would really like in the investment space is maybe the ‘opposite’ of partnerships with investment groups - it can be confusing which services are better than others given their fee structures / minimum investment amounts etc. If monzo could offer a range and help explain the differences that might be of use (though I guess this is actually a better fit for a price comparison site or money advisor - not sure whether monzo sees itself long term being money advice).
Given I’m a nutmeg user, here is my actual thought on benefits of integration:
It ultimately would be nice to see my balance (and have monzo extend to understand my financial positon overall) however my impression is that Monzo are very far away from this - e.g. what about my mortgages? joint savings account with my wife (which has subdivided pots within it? etc. Just adding nutmeg account on top of the monzo account (which I intend to use for discretionary spend) is not going to add much more to understanding my financial position (the nutmeg site itself is actually really simple/good for showing my balance and portfolio movement there so I can’t see myself moving to wanting to view my performance in Monzo)
tldr; might be nice to see balance, doubt i would actually find it useful though, would just look on nutmeg itself
What I would actually find useful is some analysis on how much spare cash I have for investing / savings and what the trend is over several months (given committed spend). This doesnt require nutmeg integration but is ultimately the data that would drive me to invest more/less in nutmeg (or make a 1 off contribution)
edit - this is what cleo / chip / pariti already do (and infact it was pariti that calculated what I currently use to work it out) but I assume this is monzo’s ambition to have such functionality (as I would see it being a ‘base minimum’ functionality of a smart current account in the future)
If you don’t want to DIY then Vanguard lifestrategy funds are the place to be at way lower fees (0.22%) than nutmeg.
The top three priorities when investing unless you are called Buffet are:
Fees
Fees
Fees
Nutmeg like most present their fees in a way that looks harmless - only £2 a week! Look, it’s nothing! But what they don’t show is the cumulative loss on your investment over time from them taking that 2 quid.
) is because I get this feedback -
(hopefully other than my monzo investment which I have high hopes for)