Inspired by @duncang in the Android teardown topic, I thought it’d be good to test our views on broad priorities for Monzo.
Just as a customer, where would you like Monzo to be putting its focus?
Fixing bugs and marginal improvements to make the app work better (like fixing iOS stability issues, bringing out pot to pot transfers etc)
Making the current account feature complete (cheque imaging, international payments etc)
Making joint accounts first class citizens
Accelerating business banking features and growth
Accelerating US features and growth
International expansion (explain where below)
New Plus/Premium features
Better budgeting, money management or analysis tools
Improving connected accounts (e.g. more providers, features like notes or bill splitting, manual accounts)
New products (e.g. Investments, crypto, mortgages etc)
Bringing in competitive savings partners to the app
Merger and acquisition of interesting companies
A redesign to make the app easier and more intuitive to use
Something else (tell us below)
0voters
I know this isn’t really how things work, and that there will be teams focused on different things, but if you were CEO for 5 minutes and had to pick one of these as your priority, what would it be?
So in my head the current account is the current account, so making it features complete would be things like international transfers and cheque imaging. Things like mortgages would go under new products because that’s what they are in my head.
I think these are two different things. I voted from customer perspective.
From CEO perspective I think Investing and Mortgage products probably most important.
Mortgage/savings etc doesn’t make sense to me unless they can be the best, which they probably can’t be at this stage. Although people do use them for loans
My mortgage requirement is the best terms/rate. If that was Monzo then great, and then it’s all in one app, but if it’s not, I won’t spend more money in interest, or forgo interest for savings, for the sake of it being together.
I’m joining @davidwalton on the good ship joint account crusade.
I’m not really sure where Monzo goes next. They’ve got a few money making things (premium/Flex/loans), probably aren’t big enough to do mortgages and then it’s probably more fine tuning and adding extras that entice others.
I suspect the internal arguments are that joint accounts won’t make enough to make it worth while improving them.
Wow, that’s a really hard poll to answer @Peter_G. The one that bugs me personally the most is the lack of Joint Account parity (though really it’s custom categories & virtual cards), so I feel kind of obliged to answer that. However, I think that’s with the caveat that I think this subset is probably not a huge amount of work, so you couldn’t really honestly call it “Monzo’s priority”; it surely couldn’t consume the time of a dominant subset of the product-focussed staff.
If I introspect about why I want custom categories so bad, the ultimate answer is “Budgeting”. So really that’s the overall most important thing here. It’s the original goal of making a Financial Control Center, later reiterated as “Making Money Work For Everyone”. It feels like the high-level overview is the thing that’s missing. This also ties together a lot of the other features. Every bank has to syndicate their data to the other banks now, so they’re all in a subtle race to be the one where people go to see their overall financial position. The bank(s) that win that race are really going to have a lot of power. And so that brings in a bunch of the other answers here - new products, competitive savings, and redesigning the app.
So I think that my answer is that Monzo’s priority should be to relentlessly orient their product development to become the best central hub amongst a lot of current competitors, to really become a platform for money, and that involves a lot of the answers above.
So much to unpack here (and I kinda want to write a long form blog post or something about it) but while I’d like that, I think I’ve come to the conclusion that Monzo is unwilling or unable to make the really difficult decisions necessary to make that happen. And are probably too bogged down with regulatory issues that come with being a bank.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m totally here for that. But I think that an innovative startup could really capture that market.
For example, I really wonder what @anon91821566 would do if he had his time again, or was going to build a new business with the same aim.
For me, I think an agile, small and focused company that’s loosely coupled with an innovative API driven bank might be an interesting place to start…
I feel focus should be on integrating features together for synergies.
For example, open banking pull money from an account does not interact with plus/premium connected account feature. I would love for the screen to show the last known balance of a given bank when trying to pull money from it.
Others noticed similar integration misses between flex/pot-cards and plus/premium spreadsheet exports (no idea if that is fixed).
It would be nice if these integration points would all work.
The bank that wins that race might not be a bank at all. It easily easily end up being a non-bank fintech like Emma.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say that Monzo making external accounts exclusive to Plus and Premium may turn out to be a strategic error because of that risk.
You can learn from Brawl Stars game. They come up with two new characters every three months. And it is thought through how their features interact with all the other characters and map features. It is a simple multiplayer shooter game. But it is really well coded. Like does this attack fly over the walls, does this attack work under the walls, can this character build things, and if they do can some other character counter act it. And so on and so worth. Making it feel, as if the new character/map/feature has always been there. Rather than it being clearly obvious that this one piece is new and shiny, and yet is a bolt-on on the side without integration with anything preexisting.
Moving Joint Account parity to one side for a moment…
If Monzo allowed (future-dated) manual transactions, which could be reported and were dealt with correctly in terms of reconciliation into the feed, I think I’d be able to drop YNAB completely. Trends is actually a very good thing - at the current feature-set stage too - so it’s really not that far off for our unique workflow. ‘Unique’ because it’s our way of doing our finances.
