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.
I settled with https://www.ratesetter.com/. I don’t worry about fees, because they take them somewhere in between - I get 2.7%, someone pays back a bit more than that, difference is theirs, if I understood that correctly. I would like to know what they get, but I don’t mind overall.
That being said, there’s not much to integrate with. Once Monzo current accounts are there, I’ll continue to use RS, as they can be topped up by card or via bank transfer. I can’t see how integration would make it a lot easier.
Integrations seem much more useful for more regular, ‘dripping’ types of savings, and that would be something I might be keen to do.
I think the idea of collaborating with a casual investment company is fantastic and would really help people manage money. It could be integrated into targets, e.g. have a target to save X amount of money a month and if you manage to do so the money gets sent straight to the investment. It could also help to avoid people going into overdraft, e.g. Monzo could give you a warning when you are running out and maybe suggest you withdraw some money from the investment.
From the comments above I don’t see much rejection of the idea maybe just a relook at the specific service provider.
Please include the good elements of the Nutmeg UI in the Monzo app rather than perhaps design things from scratch. Please bear in mind that users could just as easily go and install the Nutmeg app for iOS, so an integration has to be as slick as it would to use the service outside Monzo as inside, or else there is no point integrating. Not the biggest fan of the current pots view, so it would be a shame to see integrations just dumped there.
I hope Moneyfarm and Wealthify will be considered to give users choice.
In case anyone else is wondering, Hugo shared a preview of the Pots view here. Regardless of whether you like this design (which you haven’t actually used yet), I wouldn’t consider the integration ‘dumped’ into the tab, to me it’s clearly had a lot of thought put into it and…the interface looks very simple to use aka “slick” too -
I’m a happy Nutmeg customer. They aren’t the cheapest but they do offer a good range of investment products (pension, ISA, LISA and non-ISA) with a straightforward interface. The customer support has been good so far too, which, alongside the simplicity, I’m happy to pay a slight premium for.
An integration would really complement Monzo, especially alongside partnerships with cash savings and P2P providers. It would be good within the Monzo app to see how much I have in each of my Nutmeg pots, schedule payments to individual pots, and then see when the next payments are due. It would also be great from an ISA perspective if Monzo could borrow an idea from Nutmeg and keep track of my total ISA investment across ISA, LISA, equity and P2P to ensure that I don’t exceed the total limit.