Future Monzo: some mock-ups of what the future might hold

Feedback & Ideas
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tl;dr: mock-ups posted below!

Hello :wave:! Having had too much time on my hands I’ve been having a think about what the future might hold for Monzo :monzo: - especially with all the talk of the marketplaces and stuff (technical term).

It turned out to be a bit too long for the forum so it’s become a blog post. Expect (rubbish) mock-ups, thoughts about the future, two different sorts of platform - and Elton John.

I’d be really interested in hearing your thoughts on what I’ve got right, what’s wrong and where I’ve lost the plot completely. Oh, and I’d love to see other people’s ideas, too…

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Here’s what the Account tab might evolve into:

  1. A simple but important change: “Account” becomes “Accounts”.
  2. Pulse is moved (or is replicated?) on the accounts tab. Here, it evolves into showing you your net worth over time, with your assets and debts from different places being shown clearly.
  3. The settings of the Monzo account holder are separated from those of the accounts. These settings are all about you, the app and how you’d like it to work. Your account number is gone from here, instead replaced by your Monzo customer number
  4. Your Monzo card (or “Coral Card” as I’ve taken it upon myself to rename it) is shown separately from your accounts. This is done on purpose to change the “one card one account” mindset. Indeed, you can select which account you want to use the card for (think Curve). There are also virtual cards suggested here – so you can create a specific card number for Netflix, for example.
  5. Your accounts are listed here with their current balance showing and broken down by account type. Assets and other important stuff can also be included to get an idea of your net worth. House prices, for example, are pulled from a Zoopla API in this example.
  6. Tapping on one of these accounts would take you to a filtered view off the home screen for that account only. It’s likely that Monzo might need three or four templates for the home screen – the current one works for transactional accounts (credit cards, current accounts, savings etc), but is unlikely to work for stocks or shares or insurance products. For more complicated products, it may be that you’ll just get an overview in Monzo, with a button handing off to the specialist app.
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And the feed might look a bit different to cope with multiple accounts:

  1. Pulse now goes forward in time and is integrated with your committed spend from Summary. It provides an aggregated view of all of the accounts selected – I considered a line for each account but thought that would get messy very quickly…
  2. When the feed has more than one account displayed you see a badge indicating which account the transaction belongs to (in this example it might break down a bit if you have more than one account with a provider – needs some more thought!)
  3. The feed now has the ability to break down a transaction, or aggregate transactions as appropriate. Here, we see that there has been a transfer from one account to another. The net value is 0 – as both accounts are included in the filter for the home screen – but you see the breakdown in the notes.
  4. Another example of transaction aggregation. Here there’s been a transaction on a Nationwide account, a rule in place rounding it up and a transfer of that amount to another account. There are two badges as there are two accounts involved.
  5. Contacts now have proper records and photos attached. In this example. Elton is called “My Mate Elton” in the Monzo address book and has a photo assigned. Disclaimer: I don’t know Elton John.
  6. An banner to show that there’s a filter in place. Tapping it would let the user select which accounts to combine in the feed.
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I think there might be two takes on the marketplace - financial products (as seen in the new accounts tab) and also extensions. (I did this before the IFTTT integration was announced, but I think this still has legs and would be a really significant move):

  1. Products would take you to the financial products page with subcategories for savings, investments, insurance – as well as curated sets of products that would be intended to replace packaged accounts. Think of App Store bundles more than Barclays Blue rewards. Extensions are like micro-apps for the Monzo app itself. Either rules that folk have coded using the API, or potentially replacement for screens wholesale (here, the example is to replace Summary with something for those with weekly income). My Needs is a crude title that needs more work! The concept is that you tell Monzo your outgoings on stuff (or confirm it from what Monzo guesses from your transactions) then it monitors the market and your outgoings to see if you could get a better rate. It’d then either alert you to change or – with permission – just do it in the background with a confirmation note your feed.
  2. The Extensions marketplace may be a way for Monzo to (appropriately) monetise the app. Here, I’m suggesting what are effectively micropayment (expressed in pence rather than pounds) for functionality. But that’d all need to be thought through. I suspect a lot of basic extensions would be done out of love and given away for free. The example of a costed one here is for something more significant – a replacement of one of the standard Monzo tabs. Monzo may or may not want to take extensions this far…

Here’s how one of the extensions’ config screen might look:

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And here’s another view of the feed, taking some of this and making it a bit whackier:

  1. The Pulse graph has been left (more or less) unchanged here (except for the projection into the future). There are different options here, though – if the graph is used for net worth under Accounts, perhaps an evolution of the Summary wheel could go here? Or the ability to overlay the graph with previous months’ spending patterns – or Monzo’s predicted spending pattern for this month – so the user can keep on top of their money…
  2. Transactions can now be pinned to the top of the feed. In this example, the BA transaction also acts as your boarding pass, gives information on the flight progress and gate details etc. Monzo could then replace apps like Apple Wallet (potentially even having feed items for things that aren’t strictly transactions…). The second pinned transaction is associated with a contact stored in Monzo under the name “My Mate Elton”. This transaction has been has pinned to remind the user that Elton needs to pay them back – with a handy secondary transaction value showing how much he’s sent over. It’s red because Elton is in debt – when the money has been repaid the “amount paid back” would go green.
  3. Here, Monzo has co-developed and pushed a new open standard to merchants, allowing the details for each purchase within a transaction to be reported in the app. If there were more than two transactions, the user would be prompted to tap the transaction to see the details. Each item on the receipt could then be assigned to a different category or given a tag.
  4. Here, Monzo has – with the user’s permission – automatically compared the user’s current instant access saving’s account interest rate with that available on the marketplace – and found it lacking. Having alerted the user on the 2nd June, following a tap to confirm the switch is automatically carried out the next day – with Monzo handling all the identity and authentication checks, transfer of funds between accounts and presentation in the app in a way that is completely transparent to the user.
  5. In a similar way to the savings switch, Monzo has identified that you can save money by moving from British Gas to Bulb. In this case, though, the user’s selected an automatic switch – so it’s just happened in the background with a feed item to confirm what’s happened.
  6. Oh no! The user is costing Monzo money! But wait, it’s okay as they used Curve instead, meaning that Monzo didn’t incur the fees. More interestingly, though, the transaction has been broken-down to sub-transactions (a manual process that replicates the “receipt” style functionality that you can see on the Lidl transaction). There are more than two sub-transactions, so the user is prompted to tap to see them all.
  7. The final transaction has been swiped to the left, revealing a set of new interactions. “Pin” pins the transaction to the top of the feed (it might need some thought or an icon to avoid confusion with a card’s PIN). “Breakdown” lets the user divide a transaction into sub-transactions, each with their own categories, dates, notes and tags.
  8. The tab bar has been extended so will scroll left/right. There are additional tabs for the marketplace and – as this might be a big deal – identity. Identity’s probably a topic for another time but is about Monzo’s evolution into being an identity and authentication hub – think a little “login with Google” and a little OpenID and a splash of a digital passport/driving licence…
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I love these. Particularly as it highlights how pots (especially on Android) could do with a switch up in layout. I’d ideally love to see more info about pots in one screen - the pics for pots are way too big at the mo.

It’s also nice that pulse has a bit of extra usefulness too :grin:

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Wow, kudos. This looks amazing!

What tools do you use for your mockups?

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Thanks! So I cheated - it’s partly screenshots, but mostly Omnigraffle using iOS templates… If you look carefully you’ll see it’s an unholy child of Android and iOS design elements (and places where my graphic design skills were non existent - like the icons for the scrollable tab bar).