Quick followup from me on this - thank you for all your comments - really helpful! Two quick points:
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Our intention is not to fill the Monzo app with ads … in fact, we’ll be working hard to avoid “ads” - our aim is to send “recommendations” on ways we believe you can save money or make better use of your money in a really convenient way (i.e. aim for one-click experiences where we can). For example, a good energy switching experience would be to let you know the day before your energy direct debit is due that you are about to pay say £144 to British Gas and let you know that we think you could save £40 by switching to a different supplier … then give you a few options for suppliers to switch to, some of which will be one-click switches from within Monzo (so may only take 10 seconds, unless you wanted to look into it in more depth of course!). We’re not there yet, but that’s the plan. We hope to provide similar experiences for other products like savings/investments, insurance etc. We also plan to provide these experiences in context (e.g. provide an easy way for you to move your money into a good savings account from within the budgeting experience in Monzo). It will be a journey though - initially, the targeting may be sub-optimal and we may surface a lot of these experiences in the feed just because it’s the easiest way to ship these tests and learn from them - it doesn’t mean that will be where any given experience will live long-term - we’ll always aim to provide these in the best context within Monzo. Main point is that our top priority is to create value for you guys over making money for ourselves (obviously, we aim to do both!), so we are certainly aiming NOT to create “spammy ad-like” experience within Monzo!
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I’ll aim to communicate better with you guys. We’ll do a few blog posts in the coming weeks about partnerships, the vision and plan etc. I’ll also update you on this forum more about the tests we’re running.
Keep the feedback coming
Thanks!