My understanding is that we comply with the Open Banking standards and then some.
i.e our API is more sophisticated but the basics are compliant with the standard. I’m sure there’s some more nuance than this - equally I may be missing some context but the issue isn’t a technological one.
In that sense then it would be impossible for me to ever be full Monzo, based on current offerings. Some of their products are vastly inferior, or just simply missing in comparison with the competition.
In my opinion using Monzo for everything banking, and ignoring features Monzo does not have at the expense of competition is illogical.
Visibility of more of your accounts in Monzo . We’d like to give you a way to see all of your financial life in one place, even if those accounts aren’t with Monzo. This could cover things like credit cards, other savings accounts, or even your mortgage.
To a degree, but don’t expect us to become a full aggregator overnight.
What we’d like to do is look into the use cases and the things that our users really want and probably run some small scale tests to see if it makes sense for us. For example, let’s say there was a large demand for seeing Amex in Monzo. What would that look like, and how could we leverage it in a meaningful way that solves a problem?
One of the better user mock-ups I’ve seen, if only…
I think you raise a good point. It’s early days for account aggregation at the big banks but in its current form at least for me if doesn’t solve anything (that I can think of). Some of them actually confuse me (to much going on). Sometimes it’s nice to have a little differentiation similar to pots.
There’s a Monzo+ idea for you. If you’re able to get third party bank accounts (well, credit cards for me) connected and then expose them through your API so I can keep all my accounts updated in my spread sheet, I’d pay a monthly fee for that
Whilst I agree solving problems is one way of thinking and developing, I disagree that aggregation in of itself is pointless. It’s been imposed upon incumbents for a reason (one would hope a good one).
It may not necessarily solve a problem per se, but it provides enhancement for the user in terms of providing them a portfolio view of their disparate finances in one place. With such info, it could help the user make better decisions. This alone is appealing enough for me and why I was disappointed not to see Monzo, Marcus and NS&I in the RBS app.
Just to be clear I’m just talking about accessing the 3rd party banks via Monzo’s API. I’d expect the in app consolidation of accounts to be free/standard.
This world just be a cost to avoid having to try gain access to the other banks APIs directly if they even offer that to consumers.
Open banking is what requires and defines(?) the APIs I think. Each bank supplies one so other (registered institutions?) can read it. You can’t get at a bank’s data without using its API (unless you’re a lucky hacker).
Most banks only have the APIs open to authorised entities (AISPs?) so the account holder themselves can’t use the API but they can use an app, like Emma (via True layer/Saltedge) that can. The trouble with Emma (sorry @edo1493) is that the data is only available in the app so I’ve got no way of updating my spread sheet automatically. I’ve still got to open Emma and copy the balances down.
Monzo (and Starling I believe) are kind enough to allow account holders to access their data through the api so my Monzo balance in my spread sheet is “live”.
If Monzo start integrating with other banks so they can get balances/transactions in the app it means they can add it to their API and all my accounts in my spread sheet could become “live”
Just to highlight the usefulness of this, I’ve connected to both Amex and Monzo through some APIs. Every hour I have a process that checks the Amex balance and pending transactions and compares the total to the balance of the Amex pot in my joint account. If there’s a difference it moves money between the main balance and the pot to make it the right amount and sends me a feed item warning me what it’s just done.
I can finally go back to using a credit card for spending and the joint account to see how much money I have left to spend
Nat West have just introduced the same thing, again limited choice of banks and no Monzo!
I won’t be bothering until Monzo does the same thing and can become my financial hub.
But a lot of open banking apps at the moment aren’t really using open banking anyway. I was using Money Dashboard until recently when I realised that most of their account aggregation is done by screen scraping where you effectively hand over your login details of your bank to them, who then use a third party “Yodlee” to bring together the transactions