Genuinely curious - why does it suck?
It creates social awkwardness, but more importantly, it gives tipped workers an incentive to favour clients they assume will be good tippers and give poor service to those they assume won’t tip well or at all; which in turn is likely to create that response (self-fulfilling prophecy), and builds unconscious bias and a service gap in society.
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Ok, makes sense - but that is all based on the assumption that there was an expectation to tip.
I just liked the thought of having a mechanism to give a little back if something was great.
Oh yes, I was just referring to the general concept of tipping and not liking anything that promotes it.
Grrrrrrrr, more characters to post
In fairness i thought this was a genuine proposal rather then a trial. Though still surprised it got as far as testing.
Both companies which are hugely annoying and come across as desperate. Try advertising or cut your cloth! Both sites are a terrible experience when the begging starts.
It doesn’t offend me, i just think its really weird. A bank needing to survive on tips?
I still think the perception is based on the current societal view of a “bank”.
If the view of a “bank” was different people might think differently.
But we are all different - and that’s fine 
It’s based on my perception of a business - not limited to banking.
We appreciate the feedback, but you may be overreacting slightly here, IMHO!
The goal of our User Research team is to mock up several prototype solutions to a problem, invite groups (equal parts existing users and non users) in to test them, and document their thoughts and reactions.
Part of that is to suggest wildcard ideas, to provide a sense of perspective, and to allow us to explore an option that might be completely alien to our internal echo-chamber.
Did we expect that everyone would laugh at the tipping prototype? Absolutely.
Could we guarantee that would be the case? Nope.
It was a perfectly possible situation for a company like us who are exploring new and different approaches to legacy banking operations, to have a situation whereby all the people in user testing said “Hey - that’s a new and innovative approach. Fees suck, but maybe for the sake of convenience, we could sometimes throw in a tip instead!”
It would be incredibly dangerous for to start making huge decisions without exploring a myriad of options. That’s not us. That’s not how we do things. Particularly when it comes to fees. We don’t want to charge fees. However, we also don’t want to burn through all of our investment capital, not be profitable, and have to close down and 200+ people out of a job.
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As above i thought it was an actual proposal rather then a research exercise - hence the feedback on it!
No issue with testing anything…
In fact…probably better doing some research and understanding why people are needing to use top ups in the first instance though - then you could look to change that behaviour and reduce your costs.
It would be a proposal if it was determined to be a viable option - that was the intent of the research 
Ultimately people don’t need to use top-ups - they want to. It’s not an option that exists with legacy banks. It’s a problem that’s only come about due to the restrictions of the prepaid scheme and the migration of existing users. For folks signing up who never had prepaid, they wouldn’t know what they were missing.
It basically comes down to convenience. The overall reason that we exist is because legacy banks tend to have quite poor mobile apps. Logging in is tiresome, creating a payee can be laborious…etc etc etc.
It stops being an issue once Monzo is your main bank, which has always been the intent. Unfortunately, the runaway success of prepaid meant we weren’t always able to keep a tight handle on how our product was presented. Hence, the “travel card” thing. We aren’t a travel card, we’ve never been a travel card, but when every other product in the market isn’t traveller-friendly…well, word spreads, and suddenly the focus for many people isn’t on the fantastic app we’ve built, the instant notifications, the healthy financial life, the modern infrastructure, the fantastic customer support we aim to provide…but it changes to “ATM fees” etc. The restriction of prepaid meant we had to be people’s secondary account, but our aim has always been to be your primary account and in the long term we believe that that’s what we’ll be, as we’ll address every issue methodically as to why people wouldn’t switch to using us as their primary account.
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I am sick of seeing the TCB acronym tbh. Maybe the first couple of times it made me chuckle when it was explained but it’s not very funny. Better than Gonzo I guess but that user did get banned thankfully.
Also regarding passwords! I didn’t realise Starling had so many passwords till I tried to add a payee and didn’t remember what my authorisation password was (or that it was a separate thing). There are two passwords, your PIN, and you also have to use Touch ID to open the app. I’d rather this be simplified tbh. Idk how much more secure this makes it but it resulted in me getting blocked for a day and a half until they processed the security authorisation 
obviously my fault but I’d rather it be more seamless, like you don’t have to think about it.
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Multiple passwords have been shown to actually decrease security because, as you found out, it tends to lead to forgetting the password! 2FA is a much better way to manage the risk imho
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what does a TCB mean?
It’s from The Telegraph.
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Like this?
I think it’s a bit of fun, banter. I’ve been around the block on the net (I ran one of the most successful early IRC channels back in the early 90s) and all online communities go through a similar set of behaviours as they age.
This one is getting into the ‘a few hurt souls complain and the moderation hammer drops too heavily’ phase. We’ll see if it comes out the other side with any character remaining.
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The use of the term by the newspaper was interesting, I thought. The use of the abbrieviation of their term, on here, I perceived to be light-hearted. Others, though, had a different perception.
I didn’t think anything negative was meant by it, after all many contributors on this community are trying both Monzo and Starling and are involved here and in the other place.
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It was the first few times, but repeated use is just tedious. I’m not hurt or offended. It’s like being at a party and having to endure someone’s bad joke that they’ve told you 10 times on previous occasions. I’d rather be elsewhere.
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Starling now providing the underlying infrastructure for an ‘open banking platform’:
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