that’s interesting, I really couldn’t imagine having a different amount to spend than my partner! Would be weird. Even when we used separate accounts mainly, we still decided on a monthly spend amount and then pooled the rest to save (just meant one was contributing more to saving than the other!).
Still we are civil partners though. And we were saving for a place when this started. So maybe that’s the difference, there was never much sense of the income being anything other than ‘household’ income.
Well I assumed you would given I was responding to you, but I don’t personally know anyone who splits bills in that way. I think possibly rent but not all bills.
I only vaguely know what my partner’s salary is. It’s not my business broadly; he makes his money, I make mine and we make decisions based on what we can both afford with no questions asked if one says they can’t afford it.
Personally I want to pay at least half of everything. I don’t know where it comes from but I feel more comfortable that way. I’ll happily be honest with anyone if I can’t afford something.
Out of interest, which features in particular would people like the Joint Account to have? For me it’s:
Custom Categories
Virtual Cards
Assign virtual card to the bills pot for paying card-based bills
At the moment I can’t categoriese our spending properly, so Trends and Summary are totally useless (), and not being able to have all bills come from the bills pot is pretty annoying. Having virtual cards beyond that for untrusted websites is also of course useful.
I just need Plus/Premium on Joint Accounts (which encompasses the features you’ve requested, plus more)
Ideally, I want absolute account parity so I can have a Premium JA account with metal JA card with all the features of a Personal Account and then be able to close my/our Personal Account(s) because it/they would be redundant. MrsW would like the same too tbh. At the moment, our Personal Accounts (while we are forced to have them) are simply there to provide band-aid fixes and workarounds for all the stuff which we should be able to do from the JA in the first place.
Back in September 2021@jackcully said that although many people at Monzo care deeply about Joint Accounts, sadly nobody is actually working on them. It would of course be ideal if all features of Plus/Premium were available for Joint Accounts, but I wonder whether a smaller more app-feature-focussed subset would have more chance of actually happening - firstly because it’s a smaller target, and secondly because it requires less bureaucracy (e.g. travel inurance would require liasing with the insurance provider, etc.)
Actual app features
Custom Categories
Virtual Cards
Google Sheets Export
Advanced Roundups
Interest
Things mired in bureaucracy
Phone Insurance
Travel Insurance
Things that you can just do via your personal account
Metal Card
External Accounts
Cashback on International Transfers
Credit Tracker
5 Free Deposits a Month
Fee-free Withdrawals Abroad
Fee-free allowances
Discounted Airport Lounge Access
Offers
It would be nice if the Actual app features subset could be tacked. It feels more achievable. And to be honest shouldn’t those Just Work on your Joint account anyways if you’re a Plus/Premium user? It feels like a bad move for Monzo to make people pay more to get the same feature set on an extra one of their accounts, especially if that’s the main account that they use. So really the only barrier is the technical implementation work. And given that all of these features already exist in the app, can it be an immense amount of work to enable them on another account?
If it really was that simple, I’m convinced it would have been done by now. But because it hasn’t, there must be some underlying issue(s) which seems to repel JA development of the MVP version of the JA we have at the mo. Even with fix-it-Friday, or whatever it was called where devs could do what they wanted for a day per week/month, it hasn’t developed any further in its core feature-set.
Getting Plus/Premium on JA’s would solve a large amount of issues for JA users. Then I’d progress that and ditch the need to have a Personal Account at all (for the 2 users that have a JA)
Of concern, people appear to be being turned down for Joint Account applications. I’m sure there’s a back-story to this generalised statement but I’d guess there are 3 possible reasons for this:
The applicant(s) have a financial background which carries risk, so legitmately being refused
Monzo is throttling JA applicants, maybe ramping them all down, in order to slowly kill JA’s
There is huge JA development which requires a massive switch from the existing JA platform to the in-development JA2™ platform and so new accounts are being minimalised for now
I am concerned that Monzo no longer default to transparency. If they are going for the third one then I think they owe their potential customers an explanation, even if it’s just to say that they aren’t currently opening joint accounts, rather than leaving them guessing.
In the 2022 big poll thread, I expressed optimism. Here I’ll give the countervailing view: unless Monzo reconnects with transparency, and gets a grip of their comms, then they’ll just end up the same as any other bank. And the competitive advantage that @AlanDoe, @simonb and everyone else has built up over time will be squandered.
being everything @davidwalton said about account vs user and how Joint is Backwards.
And 2) because I suspect that for most Monzo-JA holders, the lack of parity =/= any less money flowing into Monzo as a result. As in, my money is in either one of my Monzo accounts regardless of parity level - and therefore extra development isn’t going to strengthen the bottom line per se.
So I think that leads to hypothesise 2-8 being a result of 1+2.
If I made a prediction, I think now that Monzo have learnt how to crack lending products a bit more, they’ll want to do that more aggressively for joint users, but maybe via loans and mortgage products.
I think that’s a way off - but I think the first we’ll hear about Joint Accounts having parity will be as a precursor to a significant new profit centre via Lending to Joint Users
The last part of this is interesting, but why would would Monzo accept a sole personal account if there were issues such as a financial background that carries risks?
I’m leaning (hoping) towards big positive changes coming to joint accounts and that the criteria is tightened why this is worked out.
You know, I kind of forgot that there’s a distinction between the Plus and Premium features. Wouldn’t it be eminently possible to roll out just the Plus features to Joint Accounts? That makes the problem even easier. The full feature list at the moment is:
External accounts
Interest
Blue card
Custom categories
Virtual cards
Advanced roundups
Credit tracker
Offers
Fee-free withdrawls abroad
Google sheets export
1 Free cash deposit a month
However, I’d wager that a bunch of them aren’t necessary. Specifically: External accounts (if the other person wants it, they can also pay for Plus), Interest (let’s face it, it’s negligible anyways, and you can just use a pot inside your account for this), Blue cards, Credit tracker (only applies to one person), Offers (), Fee-free withdrawls abroad (just send it to your personal account), Cash deposit (do it via your personal account and transfer it to the joint). Yes, workarounds aren’t like 100% ideal, but eqally so they are not complete blockers, whereas the lack of other features is. Therefore the subset of Plus features would be:
Custom categories
Virtual cards
Advanced roundups
Google sheets export
So really we get down to the same list of critical actual features that don’t exist. Please put them on the Joint Account, Monzo peeps .
There’s a lot more to JA parity than Plus/Premium features. But integrating Plus/Premium with JA’s would be a massive step. Here are some of the none-premium missing features:
Some of them are pie-in-the-sky-ideas, but some of them are surprisingly ‘missing’ (IFTTT/Bill splitting!)
Yes I find it quite ridiculous that they have not introduced premium features on joint accounts
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Anarchist
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I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: if it was easy and worthwhile doing they’d have done it by now. As they haven’t, it’s either too difficult, or not worthwhile.
My instinct tells me that there is some technical difficulty which is too time consuming to overcome.
There’s full transparency and there’s looking like idiots. They aren’t going to let the former create the latter.
“We’ve built them in a rushed way so you can’t have what you want. Soz.”
I’m sure there are ways around it and if that means a full re-work of something, starting from scratch etc, then I’m sure it gets pushed down a list for lots of reasons.
Also this place is a bit of an echo chamber. I fully support getting JAs upgraded, I feel like I have less of a grip just because of the lack of google export but I think (someone feel free to correct me) it’s 5% of accounts have Plus/Premium. That’s from over 6m accounts. That is a lot of money, but how many of those account holders have a joint account? Then who would pay again? If they don’t make you pay again, £5/15 goes with you for both, then the gain in revenue is even smaller.
I expect this might be the case – and given we’ve seen lots of people declined for JAs recently I suspect they might be doing something to address it in the background. Or maybe their requirements changed, but wouldn’t be surprised if they slowed down/stopped JA onboarding as and when they decide to get around to fixing account parity
), and not being able to have all bills come from the bills pot is pretty annoying. Having virtual cards beyond that for untrusted websites is also of course useful.
JA users. Then I’d progress that and ditch the need to have a Personal Account at all (for the 2 users that have a JA)
), Fee-free withdrawls abroad (just send it to your personal account), Cash deposit (do it via your personal account and transfer it to the joint). Yes, workarounds aren’t like 100% ideal, but eqally so they are not complete blockers, whereas the lack of other features is. Therefore the subset of Plus features would be:
.