That makes it even worse that they expect you to pay for a system they are part of in trading your data back n forth so they have info on you to see if you are a good egg. Trying to sell you access to it is unbelievably cheaky.
Essentially the only use is to make sure someone hasn’t nicked your identity and everything is in order.
Making this a plus benefit is ridiculous.
Fair enough but as we are being serious now, if Monzo do have to pay for access to this data (which I believe they’ve said they do) then how can they afford to pass it on for free at the moment?
(Now, I don’t know if they pay for it for their own use and passing it on is an extra which would colour my judgement.)
This 
And it will be interesting to see where they go from here.
They don’t pay it’s reciprocal. You give us, we give you. Monzo are sending data like your income and monthly outgoings totals back in return.
TransUnion aren’t doing it for nowt.
Not really a customers concern. They can’t provide the app and data servers for free either. Let alone this community.
Just don’t provide the score. It is of no value to anyone anyway 
TransUnion are the CRA.
They are required to allow you to access your own data they are holding on you for free.
But yeah Credit Karma just has an easier way to access it and again for free.
Yeah but they aren’t a charity so somebody’s paying someone somewhere.
If you aren’t a bank you’ll be paying them to do lookups on people’s records to either ID them or see if they are a good egg etc
loans, mortgages, comparison websites
TransUnion are absolutely rolling in it. They aren’t holding your data to be helpful.
The only way Monzo could have made it useful is to actually tailor it to Monzos lending criteria.
So it would say you need to be doing X to be able to get Y at Z percentage.
A bit like Zopa takes Equifax data and then creates a 1-10 borrowing power based on its own lending criteria.
I might agree for the Barclaycard integration because if I remember correctly, that didn’t come out of Labs.
The Credit Score though, that’s a different matter, that was being rolled out to customers and was clearly going to be part of the core offering by the wording of the original post and Blog coupled with the e-mail retracting the service.
I personally don’t have an issue with it as I’m getting it as part of Plus anyway but it does seem a bit disingenuous on Monzo’s part.
I wouldn’t call it disingenuous myself. I don’t think there’s been any attempt to deceive.
What we’re seeing is Monzo shift features around (in a highly volatile market right now) between their products. It sucks that the basic account has been frozen for so long, and I don’t agree with Monzo’s direction on this, but I don’t see that they’ve deliberately misled us on any of these issues.
Yeah I don’t think anyone at Monzo way back when though we’ll string a load of customers along into thinking they’ll get this for free, doing a muh-ha-ha little do they know they’ll have to be paying us £5 a month to actually get it.
Just a case of them brainstorming going right we need other things to add to Plus to make it sound better. Well the roll out of credit reporting didn’t really happen as we wanted, we’ll claw that back and shove it under a Plus benefit instead. Sure it’ll piss off a tiny percentage of forum users who wanted to see it but for millions of customers who didn’t know about it looks like we’ve created something new. Excellent thinking Brian, “do it”
I get the original aim behind Monzo to be not just a bank but a financial hub but in that regard there are others who have stolen that crown.
You can only see your score from one credit agency, so you still need to use other apps to view the others and they’re all free. And there are already websites that offer all of them combined which is what you want.
But my point still stands, why put it behind a paywall when it’s free from the provider. It’s Monzo’s choice but it doesn’t make a lot of sense. It feels a bit like, how can we justify £5.
It will fail, you give it 6-9 months if they don’t add to it…
Strictly speaking it’s not to the detriment of core monzo since it never had those features, it just means the rate of improvement there will slow.
This is the inevitable consequence of launching a premium tier based on app features. You can expect most interesting features to be plus only from now on, because that’s how monzo have aligned their incentives.
I don’t think seeing your credit score in app should be core. By not having it, that doesn’t change your day-to-day banking experience. So you’re paying for convenience of having it integrated instead of needing to go to a seperate app.
It’s a fair point that you pay for the convenience of having it integrated into the app, but I really think this and especially the linked cards feature should have been free. It could have helped with increasing salaried users. I read that salaried users was fairly stagnant around 30%. I’d love to see the team push hard to increase that to 50+%. Paywalling those things puts me off wanting to move my salary to Monzo. If Monzo needs revenue asap, then placing these behind a paywall definitely makes sense though.
You can say that about all features, of course I’d like everything to be free but a line has got to be drawn somewhere.
I can imagine it’s a tough balance because it is never going to please everyone but I think this is fair for the reasons I gave above.
But NatWest offer it free in their app, fully integrated, same credit agency.
It was available in the app for a while, for many, it then got switched off and now it’s behind a paywall.
I really like Monzo but I think they’ve not been innovative enough. They’ve sadly stalled and other banks and apps have caught up or in some cases over taken them.