From the few conversations with them, they are. It’s usually the reason behind why they can’t do something.
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That’s really poor form from Twitter.
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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!
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Thanks. Personally, I joined too late to see the ‘first pass attempt’ at the electricity switching recommendation so I don’t have any explicit comments (and may not have received it anyway, I guess) but I do find myself (surprisingly) open to such things if they’re handled sensitively (as others have suggested) and if they actually offer savings and are not just bank revenue opportunities (sorry!).
I have become the sort of person that switches energy provider annually in any case in recent years so may not be the in the key demographic to benefit from that aspect of such things although easing the process would be useful. Now if only you could simplify getting any overpayment back from a cancelled supplier!
Thinking about it now, I believe frequency comes into the ‘reaction equation’ as well as sensitivity. Seeing an insurance option every week will quickly sour me to the idea in the same way as a ‘Save money now!’ type headline banner so let’s see if we can avoid that. As others have said ‘Ads in my bank statement’ will get a powerful negative reaction.
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I saw on Twitter that Monzo is recommending the energy supplier “bulb” on people’s current account feed. If anyone wants to join bulb you can use my referral link, if you do you get £50 credited to your account:
For the sake of full disclosure, I get the same benefit.
Ads, recommendations, targeted “help”, whatever you want to call this… these are advertisements in my transaction feed which I did not ask for. I will be contacting support to use the opt-out clause of the T&C.
Hopefully the GDPR will make short work of this unsolicited targeted advertising for (sometimes paying) customers.
There was a time when EE used to text me with upgrade offers. I reminded them that I’d long opted out of marketing. They stated that these texts were not advertising but were “essential account information that we have to give you by law.”
When I asked them for the legislation that said they had to do this, they soon backed down.
Long and the short is that big organisations are happy to ignore the wishes of their customers as they can afford to be arrogant. They don’t care if one customer leaves. There’s plenty of others.
Monzo, a billion customers is a target to which to aspire but don’t act like big business and piss off your customers along the way, please.
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Monzo have always been transparent about their vision regarding providing relevant and useful information regarding these sort of offers. I think the bank vouching for my identity and saving me time is a useful service and if they can check that I would actually save money based on my monthly direct debit, that’s more useful to me. If I’m saving money and Monzo benefits at the same time, that’s great for both of us. There’s a line between “useful, money saving offer that I can dismiss and never see again” and “irrelevant offers that are not worth my time and border on obnoxious” in my opinion.
Given I will not use the overdraft and therefore will not be a paying customer I don’t have a problem with this. In principle I think the GDPR is useful and it’s great the opt out is there, but how would you rather help to fund the bank if not through partnerships with e.g. utility companies? This seems much more ethical than charging for a failed direct debit, or ripping off vulnerable customers with unplanned overdraft fees.
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I’ve just received a response from support which states:
it is not currently possible to opt out of partnerships, as these are a key component of the Monzo offering
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Yes, it may seem more ethical, but this is a false dichotomy: there are other alternatives: for example, you have provided crowdfunding (another way of funding the bank) and it’s always possible to offer credit (e.g. overdrafts).
Yes, the GDPR is useful and great precisely because it does not care about an organisation’s arguments for targeting.
Yeah, presumably they mean partnerships like the upcoming TransferWise integration there too.
Here’s how you opt out, once you receive the 1st of these offers.
I’d recommend taking some time to think this through though. If Monzo can see that you’re paying more than you should for your current service, why would you not want to know that?
It’s also worth mentioning that from what I hear, a lot the users who actually received the feed item gave positive feedback. I appreciate the fact that advertising is generally a poor user experience but it might be in your interest to at least wait & see what you think of Monzo’s approach first.
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It’s actually as a result of this topic in this community that Bulb appeared on my radar.
I’m due to be switching energy providers imminently as FirstUtility are not the great deal they once were. Having done some research, Bulb offers the best deal for me.
If Monzo wants to send me my current account, pronto, I’m happy they take the referral fee. I can’t say fairer than that 
That’s great, but that means I must first be targeted and receive an ad. Surely under section 16.7.4 I should be able to do that beforehand.
I’m now waiting for a working-hours response from the Monzo team to my question of whether these feed items are considered to be
[contacting me] in another way about other products and services which [Monzo] consider may interest [me]
as there’s no mentions of the marketplace, “central offering”, or partnerships in the T&Cs. I imagine they’ll get updated again soon. Let’s consider this as ironing out some of the wrinkles in the T&Cs.
Has anyone who switched to Bulb using the Mozno feed item received the £25 credit yet? I signed up that way and paid my first bill yesterday, but no sign of the credit in my account?
You are aware this is also a preview currently? The way these things are displayed is highly likely to change from feedback. So you may find there is an Offers tab in the app in the future, rather than on the feed.
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Yes, I’m aware, but the T&Cs still apply to the preview, no?
Then I hope my feedback to the Monzo team is now clear: no inline targeted ads, please. Use a separate tab, but don’t be pushy about it 
I genuinely believe no. When we all move over to the full CA we will accept or decline new T&Cs so the way I understand it, they are only relevant for the prepaid card currently.
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Aha! yes, you’re right. The bank app has a different T&Cs with a separate privacy policy.
The privacy policy in the Monzo Bank app (Version 1.1 — July 27, 2017), however, also states:
Market and communicate our products and services and those of affiliated partners where we think these will be of interest to you. You can always unsubscribe from receiving these if you want to, by email and via the app.
So the ambiguity in the privacy policy is still there.
I have no intention of changing supplier. I carefully choose my providers for lots of reasons. For example - I’m with Ecotricity because I like their ethos and I like the way they’re run and their ethics. They put money directly back into building wind power, solar power and green gas - and bothering the government to push things forward. (You could compare them to Monzo in lots of ways)
They aren’t the cheapest and I know that - but I’m not changing.
My insurances are with Co-op Insurance for ethical reasons, I’m not changing that either.
I could go on.
It’s only in preview stage. We’ll have to wait (quite a while probably) to see what happens.
But my feedback, personally, is that if advertising/partnerships/help to save money whatever you want to call it, isn’t completely segregated in it’s own area or otherwise personally invited by me via an API or whatever - then I’ll be closing my account at the first sign of any ad in my feed (on the final product) that doesn’t come with an option to permanently and completely dismiss it and all future ads.
I absolutely love the product but I really strongly believe that adverts (because that’s what they are) in the transaction feed is a really really bad idea. I also think it will stop people choosing Monzo. - I don’t think people are gullible enough to fall for the ‘we’re helping you’ line either. It’ll make Monzo look cheap and unprofessional in my view.
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And what a strongly held view that apparently is…
I don’t actually disagree but I’m not that fussed about it that I’m contemplating any action at the moment. Let’s see what it looks like in practice.
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