Second account / Pot with its own account number and sort code

Before I came to Monzo, I had two main accounts:

  • for day-to-day expenses (with a card)
  • for salary, rent and bills (no card, managed online only)

The reasons:

  • safety - since second account doesn’t have a card, it’s much more difficult to lose that money
  • convenience - after all direct debits and standing orders for rent and bills, which are all done at the beginning of a month, I can easily see how much I have available this month
  • references - when moving house and having to prove that I pay my rent on time, all I need (and nothing more) is in once place
  • legal / proof of address - when having to prove my address it is convenient to have an account used regularly, but which has only a few transactions each month (I am not sure how this one would work with Monzo since I rely on paper statements for this)

In Monzo that would mean giving a pot its own account number and sort code. Probably on request only, not by default, as otherwise we would run out of account numbers pretty quickly. Also, it probably shouldn’t be possible to delete such pot as I could have given those details to someone to transfer me money (e.g. my friend or employer), there should still be possibility to rename it and change image. There might be a restriction e.g. max 1-2 per user.

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:monzopride: Monzo’s plan is to do all that you want in the main account with pots paying out your Direct Debits and holding back other expenses that the system learns you want to keep separate.

But they’ve designed it so you don’t need a second set of account details. It’s essentially ringfencing portions of money in the one account.

Tom has also talked in the past about reinventing things like needing to provide paper statements, collected monthly, just to prove address and financial competence. Because, what’s the point? Surely it’s better to build something that companies plug into to ask Monzo directly if you’re good to go?

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You’ve done a great job of explaining your use cases here :fire:

You don’t need to worry about that, you’ll be able to claim money back that’s taken through fraud (assuming you stick to the T’s & C’s) & you really want, you can keep money in Pots to stop it being spent on your card.

The Summary is designed to make this easy to do & it’s steadily improving.

I expect you’ll be able to filter your exports for this sort of thing :soon: & you could simply highlight the transactions on your statement in the meantime.

Monzo can provide paper statements.

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@j06 That sounds great. Will it be possible to somehow define my salary to go to a specific pot? I think the easiest and most reliable option would be to set a rule for the source - i.e. every transfer from this person goes to pot X.

Might be easy, but seeing my colleagues affected my Ticketmaster breach, this is a distress that I would rather avoid. Thanks for the all the info on other points - not sure why I assumed that Monzo doesn’t do paper statements :slight_smile:

No worries, in that case you can just keep your money in Pots :slight_smile:

Great idea!!!

July 2018 and nothing has changed on this.

Solving this use case is the only thing stopping me going full Monzo. Right now, pots and Summary and far too limited to allow for this. And given focus is on features that will bring in customers/earn Monzo money I don’t see it changing this year at all.

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Wouldn’t this give the edge over Starling? I know, this has been discussed, but this could possibly be the one feature to convince the unconvinced. Would certainly make a lot of people ditch their old bank accounts.
Starling already has the possibility of having second account in the form of EUR account.

How does this idea work from a profitability viewpoint?

If Monzo makes £X per year per account, that would surely be at least halved for everyone with more than one account and could potentially blow the unit economics calculations of the bank. At the very least, they’d have to figure out a new way to measure that sort of thing.

It may happen one day but the impact of allowing it appears (to me) to be far from straightforward so a lot more thought and care will be required than may appear at first sight.

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Yes, but they’d change the metric to profit per customer, presumably.

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I dont like this idea at all. If summary worked to its full potential and pots were also brought into the equation a second seperate account wouldn’t be needed.

But I agree that summary needs more work to fit for all.

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I’m sure they’d change something, yes. It was intended more as an illustration that there must be more to consider than just a Boolean decision to allow multiple accounts.

For instance, if they’ve got someone’s profitable account in-house then I doubt they’d actually want the second, non-profitable account. The reverse is also true, of course.

I wonder what the split is and how you work out whether you’re adding to or detracting from profits by doing this?

Not just summary… scheduled payments/salary also needs to be far far more flexible.

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July 2019 and nothing has changed on this.

I’d imagine that the marginal cost of creating a second account is extremely small, it’s a few bytes in a database.

There’s clearly more to it than that (if the account is actually used) but I agree it’s probably not a lot.

I know the long term strategy here but I do think Monzo would be better off allowing customers another account and then when they are ready with committed spend/bills pots/whatever they end up calling their solution, prompting people in app to merge their accounts or convert one of them to a bills pot. Too many people have said that the current system doesn’t work for them.

Hmmm… ‘too many people’?

Given the number of people with Monzo accounts vs the number of people on this Forum (vs the number of people who could be bothered to comment on this as well), I’m not sure that statement holds up.

The needs of the many and all that.

I’m happy with my ‘solution’ at present. Sure I’d move everything to Monzo of all of this Pot/Summary/Budget would work the way I want it to but I’m not holding my breath as my circumstances are not in the majority.

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Don’t think anything will.

The first thread when I opened the forum to reply just now was “why I regret going full Monzo” stating this as the exact reason. This comes up in thread after thread. Also, the relative number of users on the forum is statistically speaking, evidence that more people are in this position than just those who comment.