I know a Monzo account holder who has previously got into financial difficulties (and is still in some, but the Monzo account is helping) who has some suggestions on how Monzo can help people like them:
Different card colour/harder to read card.
A problem they’ve highlighted is that it is just too easy to spend on Monzo: the card is very obvious in their wallet/purse and the numbers are easy to read: meaning a lower “barrier to spend unnecessarily”. I’m not actually sure what Monzo could do in this apart from offering a dark blue card like practically everyone else (with numbers which rub off…)
Changing the notification sound.
Yes, it’s good - but it does (for this person) act as a kind of “reward” for spending: the lovely ‘chur-ching’ noise we all love, they also love it and what better way of getting it to sound than spending more than they should… They’ll still like an alert (in case of card compromises etc), but being able to change it to something less rewarding (think Nedry from Jurassic Park ‘Nu, nuh, no…’ or a depressed sounding ‘de-chunk’) or a custom sound file on their phone would be good.
Budgeting pots
Being able to set direct debits to come from certain pots and then have the pot ‘auto-top-up’ to a set limit whenever it is able in a whole figure. For example: ‘Pot Credit Card X: Keep £50 in at all times’. Direct Debit comes out of that pot, reduces the balance to £5. As soon as the main account then in more than £45 credit (for example, straight after pay-day), take £45 and put it in the pot to reserve it for the next direct debit. It’ll then make it very difficult to be unable to budget for it.
Shared viewability
They’d also like another person to be able to easily keep an eye on their spending: they haven’t said if they’ll prefer this 3rd party to have ‘full visibility’ into the account (see all transactions) or just get a daily/weekly/monthly summary (such as the monthly overview detail, but without being able to drill down beyond the categorisation level). The 3rd party the have in mind is also a Monzo account holder, but being able to access this via email or a web page would be ok.
In terms of a second person having access to the account, you can be signed into one Android phone and one iPhone at the same time. If your friends had an Android phone with Monzo, the second person can log into your friends account on an iPhone, and monitor it that way.
Spending notifications can be silenced on Android; when one appears, hold down on it and options appear; choose ‘silence notifications’.
If they’re not already, Coin Jar could help them save, especially if you say what you’ll do with the Coin Jar funds. Putting them towards something non-rewardjng might help: “everytime I make a purchase, it’s rounded up to the nearest pound. That roundup money is going to charity, so I don’t keep it.”
Alas - since they have a Monzo account themselves, means having a second phone just for that - and then there’s the login flow via email…
Yep - I pointed that out to them - but they like knowing when the money left their account (for whatever reason), but they don’t want it to be quite as rewarding as the chu-ching.
I think when the salary gets paid in, I’d like Cuba Gooding Jnr shouting “Show me the money!”