This is so funny. I had to call up my credit card
Provider about an error they had made . Wasnāt given correct info & some contradictory , was transferred to a Nice Manager who instantly accepted the service I received was not acceptable & made amends . I then went onto tell him about Mondo & how they would have dealt with it better & perhaps the situation would not have arisen, to cut a long story short he said āIām looking at there website & they look amazingā. Oh My God I harped on for half an hour about the crowdfunding, fee free worldwide transactions , real time transactions, freeze your own card & much more , & by the end of the call the guy had downloaded the app & is now in the queue . I am the best Salesman on Gods Earth 
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Not going to lie, I think I got someone earlier in the āDebit Card Servicesā team at Barclays signed up to Monzo too! I was going on about how banks like Barclays are falling behind in both customer service and also technology, and then thereās Monzo, whoās bang up to date with technology, and have a fantastic little team who will help when something goes wrong! He said heād never heard of Monzo but will probably have a look and sign up!
(Have a feeling though if his QA team listen to that call he may get in a bit of trouble hahaha)
I went for a āfinancial health checkā inbranch at Natwest - ended up talking to the advisor about how I day to day bank and showed him Monzo - he was impressed!
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Youād be surprised how much people inside the big banks know about Monzo. Itās talked about quite a lot. Not necessarily on the ground but behind the scenes we do.
I imagine there is a bit of frustration at Monzo easily solving some industry needs e.g.:
- Ability to āfreeze cardā from app
- Display auths rather than settlements
I would guess that functionality has been thought of many times in banking but hard to implement as would impact many different streams
Yeah the legacy systems prevent a huge change.
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Ok Iām not an expert so bear with me. Why canāt the other banks just do what mondo did & create the same modern systems Mondo has under @tom? Then when systems in place switch over from legacy systems to the kind of systems Mondo does? 
Because it would take so many resources and money, something that banks are trying to save atm.
They have loads of cash at the moment as the government gives them access to billions in quantitive easing ā¦ surely Mondo infrastructure would not cost too much for the banks who have much more capital than Mondo at the moment ?
The problem which Josh was referring to when he mentioned legacy systems is what programmers would call technical debt. Once you develop a very complicated system, with lots of links between different tools & databases, that must be maintained in order for them to work, itās very difficult to switch that system to a new architecture.
Start ups like Atom are trying to build apps on top of existing bankās infrastructure but theyāre limited, in terms of functionality that they can develop, by having to integrate with the bankās existing systems.
You also have to contend with bankās compliance departments which are very risk averse & want to avoid change as much as possible (because you have to try to anticipate all of the things that might go wrong when you change something so itās safer to just say no, in case you miss something).
Tom talks about these challenge quite a lot in this video
"thereās all of these teams, in these big banks, thatāre sat there to say no to stuff
(search the transcript for compliance for more examples!)
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Wow I get it now. Ty for your time & effort ā¦
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I would imagine thats actually often a bigger blocker than the technical debt from my experience working in financial services (its not just compliance, its all the different teams that have jurisdiction: risk, compliance, legal, training, support, operations etc etc all have to be involved in any major changes). It would probably be cheaper/easier for one of the existing banks to just buy Monzo than try to re-create it internally. The problem then is that you lose the ability for it to act quickly/independently once you have all the traditional departments involved again.
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Thanks for explaining it. This is exactly my point.
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