Testing Marketplace Beta

Firstly, wanted to re-iterate what Richard said in the email and apologise for the confusion with the emails. We should have a much more robust process in place for the next batch of users to be whitelisted. This should give you an indication of how beta we actually went for the Marketplace – our goal is to have something for you to test as quickly as possible, so we can learn fast and iterate faster!
Sincere apologies @patrice58 @AndySUK @caspararemi. I can assure you we didn’t go home until we got it working!

With that in mind, I’ll try and respond to all the wonderful points you’ve raised. Keep 'em coming!

This is great. We initially thought that we’d limit the amount of “work” users had to do, while we figured out what matters to you in relation to all these products. There’s a bunch of other inputs we’d find useful, for example how many bedrooms you have in your flat and what was your latest kWh usage so that we can provide a far more accurate estimate on your energy bill.

I’d love to jam on this idea - I’m not a designer either, though. Do you think you could sketch something rough for us? :pray:t3:

@kennc05 @liamdaly You should definitely get access today, get in touch via DM if you haven’t by end of day!

There’s a really fine balance to strike between ease of purchasing products and services and making sure vulnerable customers are not drawn into a dangerous cycle of impulsive purchasing. Nevertheless, our goal for the next couple of months is to understand the pain points in the journey to accessing these products and focus on eliminating them.

At this point in the Beta, that won’t be the case. You can definitely fund the savings accounts from your Monzo app but that would be done via a bank transfer that you can initiate from the Payments section. However, ultimately we want to make it as simple as possible to control any other account you might have with a third party, whether via pulling the balance through their API or allowing payment initiation from their website – open banking will be great for this.

Good point - in the case of energy providers, we do state that we earn a commission for any successful referral. For savings, we are not receiving any commissions at this stage but we should totally make that clear to avoid any confusion!

@Avishai so much good feedback! Let me try and break it down.

That’s super interesting. I’ve been thinking about this and if we “hid” the Bulb offer from you and it was actually the best deal for you, it would almost seem we want you to switch regardless so we can get the commissions. What we’d like to do is being able to pull the actual usage and billed amount so that we can provide more accurate estimates and only show you the ones that beat your current provider.

The order is alphabetical for now, it seemed the most objective way to display them to avoid suggesting whether one product or provider was better for you. Some people might be looking for the absolute best rate, others are more interested in things like smart readers (in the case of energy). What do you think it would be the fairest way to display them?

Totally fair. I think a good solution instead of displaying a huge amount of information in a table would be to allow you to sort / filter through the offers. On the other hand, I wouldn’t expect this list to grow massively. There are only a handful of providers across all spaces that provide smooth digital experiences, transparent products and good customer support. Long-term we definitely want to make sure all companies are 100% aligned with our core values!

I agree that at the moment, it is not the most useful of price indications. However, most people don’t think in terms of energy unit costs but rather in terms of savings. Same as above, by asking you some more information we can provide a far more accurate estimate and tell you more precisely how much you’d be saving (if anything at all) by switching.

With regards to the landing pages, I totally agree. Co-branding would definitely add to that feeling you’re on the right path and it doesn’t feel as much like a cold handover to a third party. We went really MVP on this one as we didn’t want to be slowed down by the partners release cycles and product development priorities. It’s high up on our priority list, though!
Interesting point on the mobile switching – it seems fairly straightforward to build a “Save this offer for later” and send it to you via email so you can access it on desktop. Thanks for sharing!

Yup :100:. It’s not too complex to build, it’s up on the list for the next couple of iterations!

As @garete mentioned, they have many many products and that score is not really representative of the specific products. I am also interested to know how much do you rely on Trust Pilot? Is it a key indicator for you?

:100:. What’s difficult is boiling down what are usually complex and detailed terms and conditions into digestible format in our app. I’ll have to give this a lot of thought to come up with something useful :slight_smile:

I really like the way you translated them. That makes a lot of sense and it’s very easy to change! :raised_hands:

Yes, this feels very annoying and we are actually fixing it early next week. It’s not as easy as we’d hope but we are confident we’ll get a solution soon. Bear with us :pray:

@evangelskies have you submitted feedback in the main section of the Marketplace? If you tap on “I’m interested in something else”, you can tell us exactly what you’d expect to see. That would be hugely valuable for us!

Do you work for Monzo? Cause you seem to be reading our minds :wink:
To give you some more flavour to this, there are a couple of routes we could take:

  1. The one you mentioned means essentially replicating the third party’s customer journey in the Monzo app. This has some complexities around updating it anytime the partner needs updating it as well as deciding how much of the customer journey to replicate. An example of something painful is the ISA transfer form, that needs printing, filling in and sending via post. The amount of work required would also mean we wouldn’t be able to do it with many partners and we’d have to be more selective. Some people prefer choice, so we’d have to strike a good balance.

  2. An alternative is to simplify the process on the third party’s end, for example by creating something similar to “Sign up with Monzo” using our APIs to pre-fill application forms, initiate payments and do KYC. The downside here is that Monzo has no control on the customer journey but it feels a bit more of a “marketplace” type of integration

We don’t have a preferred route at this point, we are keen to explore both and do as much user testing as possible.

I’m very interested to hear more about this. We obviously tried to keep it slightly separate as it is a Beta after all. We are not sure the entry point would be on the Accounts tab in the future or whether it’d warrant a separate tab. It is also currently built as a webview rather than native on purpose, so that we can iterate very fast without having to go through fortnightly app release cycles.

Thanks for raising this, will look into it and make a fix as quickly as possible.

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