Pots

Making Monzo Sneak Peeks (Archived)
1

Hi there,

I’d like to give you a very quick sneak peek on something that we’ve been exploring lately.

The idea of this is to let you create pots to segregate your funds. Many people tell us that they’d like to “hide” money away from their current account (so they can budget better) plus all the usual stuff we’ve discussed in the forum: rules to roundup and save pennies automatically, goals with a certain amount as objective, rainy day funds, holidays, etc.

On top of that we think this could be pretty cool to let other services integrate into your Monzo as a pot, so you could have one for your ISA or savings… or even a negative one for your student loan.

This is how it could look, please let us know what you think :slight_smile:

Thanks,
Hugo

PS: We’ve used Nutmeg here as a placeholder just for you to get the idea, we don’t have an agreement with them or anything like that.

Oh, one last thing, should we actually build this it would be the same concept for Android, we’ve designed it first on iPhone because we had some of this stuff already built before, nothing else… please don’t despair :muscle:

178 Likes
2

This is exactly what I want. The only thing i’d like to ask @hugo is would we be able to create pots without putting anything in them? E.g. I want a holiday pot but wont be able to put money in it till my next payday? Would be a bit annoying to have to wait till I could put money in but it’s not the end of the world.

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3

I’ve just spotted an extra detail from the first screenshot too -

it looks like we’ll be able to check our CSC (aka CVV2) in the app, which should come in handy when you want to buy something online but don’t have your card within reach :heart_eyes:

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4

Pots :raised_hands:

Would come in so handy for budgeting/saving. I’ve already lost a returned rental deposit into my legacy bank account and something like this would make it so much better when it comes to fishing it out again for the next place… :roll_eyes:

Pre ‘full-accounts’ or post?

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5

Looks great, @hugo! I would find this useful. The name “Pots” resonates. It took me a a few seconds to connect it to the term “money pot”. The iconography is super clear and the swipe left/right looks familiar. Nice!

An alternative to “pot” is “bucket” – “Yeah, I chuck fifty quid in my holiday bucket each month!”. However, we actually use “pot” in our household. We stick money in the fun pot every month which usually ends up paying for unexpected bills. The fun pot is sometimes called the not-so-fun pot :slight_smile:.

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Of course, you should be able to create them empty and then make deposit or assign rules. I wouldn’t be surprised if some people would use them as some sort of shopping list for the things they want to purchase. For example, if you are planning to make some improvements to your living room you could make four pots (Gaming console, TV, Sofa, Sonos) and then make rules to reach all those goals and finally make the purchases.

There are still a few rough edges around the concept but I’m fairly confident it could work for most of the use cases we’ve seen.

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er, four? God job you in IT and not handling the accounts :joy:

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8

I was just checking you actually read the words and not just look at the pretty pictures! :wink:

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9

pots. look. awesome. Great work - can’t wait!

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10

Looks great! This is one of the main features that would let me close all my existing bank accounts and fully move to Monzo!

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11

Looks great!

Interested if some time in the future there would be ‘Monzo savings’ pot with interest paid.

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12

It doesn’t look like it -

but…

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13

I think this will be the first time I’m going to say I don’t like it. It fits really well in terms of having multiple accounts with different providers but I always thought pots were deserving of having their own screen.

It just so happens that Starling have posted up what they are planning for their version of this. I have to say it matches what I feel looks the best way of visualising this: https://www.starlingbank.com/the-starling-bank-roadmap/

I want to be able to see progress bars against savings goals. Squirrel.me does it in a similar way.

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14

It sounds like you might be thinking of something like an adapted version of the target’s bars so perhaps this :arrow_down: ?

I’d be interested to see how / if the two features fit together - it seems like it’d make sense if they did…

1 Like
15

Yeah I think if we had this on the accounts page and a separate page on the Breakdown page showing the pots in the same manner as Starling/Squirrel that would be ideal. Maybe a more advanced version of targets that helps you divide up your income between bills, pots and current account.

Something else to think about, shouldn’t pots be like sub-accounts of each account. On here you show nugmeg. If for example the nugmeg account has 3 pots, are you going to show this at the same level as the other accounts on this screen?

I do like hugo’s suggestion of having negative accounts under there such as student loans. I’d like Monzo to help me with paying off debts too.

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wow thats the best sneakky preview i like @hugo

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17

This looks really great!
Will sharing the pots be an option so me and my girlfriend can both deposit into a holiday fund etc?

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that is one of the cool features at bunq being able to create up to 10 accounts for things like holidays and saving and being able to share those accounts with other users, but they even allocate an account number for use with their pots

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19

Shared pots (or joint accounts) will be coming a little bit later, here’s the latest update from the team on that feature -

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20

I really like this. In the Ideas section @Danthejaw suggested that there could be restrictions placed on them so that you don’t keep dipping in to the pots, and the money would be ‘released’ when you actually need it. I’m awful at saving so I hope something along those lines is implemented.

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