Have to echo the navigation concerns raised, I bounced out of marketplace half a dozen times when I didn’t intend to.
Plus 1 for the make it seamless to sign up - I’d have stuffed some money into one of the savings accounts if my details had been prefilled. As it was, I’m not going through tiny pages on their web sites to fill in details on my phone. I want to be welcomed as a known entity, basically I want the savings accounts to be as seamless as pots - I pick one and send it some money.
Just got an invite…my thoughts:
If I decided on a product, I would prefer a link to download their app to apply, or an email so I can apply later on my laptop. I think the long term goal is one click account opening, but until then I would not sign up through the link in the app in one process.
I would be interested in some filters/badges on providers e.g. Fintech, app available, new, improved rates, popular, integration with Monzo available etc.
Looks like (on Android) they’re using Chrome custom tabs, which is really Chrome skinned to look like the Monzo app rather than an embedded browser. Also clicking the menu and “Open in Chrome” moves the tab over to your main, standalone Chrome instance seamlessly.
Wrote some feedback in the marketplace, but it wouldn’t submit, it seems.
Thinking of saving…
Until there’s a real step change in convenience, such as one click application, or something else, I can’t really see the point of what’s on offer. The products don’t compete with what I already have.
Maybe it’s a mistake to go with traditional products in the first place. If you’ve got a load of customers who are keen for a pot to skim off the pennies, how much do they need a fixed one year saver with a minimum balance of one grand?
Anyone who has more to save is definitely going to shop around and have a higher threshold in terms of faff…
Agree. Having everything in one app rather than going to a third party website would make everything flow nicely
Looks interesting. I’m pretty good at making sure I’m on one of the best rates but your instant access recommendations would improve my rate by 0.1% (which surprised me) although that’s probably too small a difference for me to bother opening an account. (My girlfriend on the other hand is rubbish at switching and would definitely benefit from this type of thing). The trouble with cash saving though is that it’s much better to use interest paying current accounts and I have been using peer to peer lending a lot since rates dropped so low so it’s an uncompetitive category for me. I also try and invest ethically now and that might be a good category to think about if you start to branch into investments as well. There is currently a big gap for a comprehensive ethical marketplace or comparison site. Triodos, abundance. Ethex, lendahand and assetzcapital would all be good places to start for people ok with the idea of taking on a degree of risk in exchange for a better return.
Appreciate that other categories make sense as a starting point. I think you should also make a point of curating the market place and using the trust members have in monzo to carefully select what you think to be the best (and not necessarily the cheapest products) that you can find and not just an app based alternative to money supermarket. What I would like it to feel like is a list of products that kind of reflect your brand. Eg if monzo did insurance it would probably look like this. Bulb for energy or giffgaff for phones spring to mind.
I think one thing that might be a good feature is for members to enter in the dates their various contracts or initial discount periods are up so that the app can prompt you to take a look at the market place at the right time. For example I just renewed my broadband so will be tied down for 2 years but if the app directed me to the market place at the earliest point I am able to start shopping around I would probably be more than happy to reward the time, effort and cash you would be saving me with the commission. I guess I would need to feel confident you were recommending competitive rates or applying ethical criteria (eg only suggesting renewable energy tariffs) but if I got to the point of trusting the market place I would probably be willing to use it. At the moment I always go to money supermarket and would be happy for bulb to replace that even if you arent providing every product out there.
As for the functionality itself it’s all clear and intuitive but nothing really blew me away. I think innovative categories might help and making more if the fact these products are endorsed as good ones by monzo.
Not sure if anyone has noticed this but all the energy prices have just dropped. How do you know why they have dropped and when?
For example OVO was £82 but is now £72.
First of all thank you for giving me early access to Marketplace Beta.
These are my initial thoughts.
What do you think of the way that the key product details are presented for each product & transparent pricing?
For savings it does not say whether Monzo does get a cut. Even if they don’t, they should probably mention it (otherwise is not very clear and leaves room for interpretation). They do mention how much they receive from the energy providers.
If they will switch to in-app interaction (I think they should do this at least for Savings to make Monzo a cutting edge app) a lot of it probably will change (I will leave this to the designers and product team) but I imagine it should have a slider where you select how much you want to invest monthly or as a one-off and for how long, then it will automatically present you with a list of providers and expected interest.
I agree with the latter part of this. Mention how much you have in savings and what type of account you are looking for and then compare the tailored results.
So far I like it. Obviously it is in the early stages so we can’t see many options, but it seems quite simple to navigate on the most part and the information about each energy provider is a nice little summary. The back button at the top can be confusing as that is the intuitive place to press to go back one page, as opposed to out of the whole marketplace. I will give more feedback as there are changes implemented.
Also, I’m not able to submit feedback in the app.
Yeah ‘In app browser’ is just chrome underneath. There’s an equivalent on iOS that uses safari. Sometimes Apple requires you use it if your App has any external links to make sure that you stay within the current running app.
Last time I switched, I had to compare unit price. I don’t have gas, and my electricity is day/night tariff. After comparing. Bulb happened to have all three (day cost, night cost and standing charge) cheaper than my ongoing tariff with British Gas. Here’s how it looked in my spreadsheet:
I agree with you, monthly price is nothing without context. BUT, what is easily comparable is unit cost. If Monzo would ask us to retype cost from our most recent bill (3 values, seems low effort), take our postcode and then compare it to deals across suppliers, this is what would be my preferred solution. Monzo could store our cost per unit, and notify us if they find something that seems better at a later date.
If all prices per unit are cheaper, then it’s no brainer - as long as you don’t get yourself stuck in lousy deal for 2 years ahead, most likely you should switch. I’m speculating that for many users who didn’t change their tariff recently, a comparison should end with a full set of unit prices being very clearly cheaper than their current tariff. It’s difficult to tell how many users could fall under this simplest scenario, but knowing how many people don’t switch at all… it could be a good chunk of users! 
But there are problems that escape simple ‘compare unit price and pick one that’s cheapest’. It might be that price per unit is cheaper for day, but more expensive for night, or standing charge differs etc… then it would require further data input from user to really make a spreadsheet to calculate sums in full (based on last 3 months usage?). That’s a bit more hassle to make it work. I’m not sure if Monzo wouldn’t be entering ‘uswitch’ comaprison area a bit too much, but I totally wouldn’t mind if they do this better. I’m not a fan of comparison sites, they earn commission just like Monzo is, but I’d trust Monzo over ‘uswitch’ and others.
Valerio mentioned that they don’t get any cut from Savings section yet. It kinda shows how important this aspect is. I quoted his reply below:
This sort of shenanigans is common place when purchasing a commodity, as it obfuscates so that unsophisticated purchasers revert to known suppliers. It happens in energy (really it comes down to cost per unit plus a fixed cost for the gubbins), mobiles (free calls between some users, ridiculous over charging for excess data, foreign use etc), broadband (force inclusion of phone line, mix in other packages), etc etc
I’d give the consumer protection agencies way more teeth to force the suppliers to stop this practice. But then we’d end up with just a few suppliers who really are efficient and supply these commodities at minimal cost. Who’d have thought, capitalism at work.
Well, to be honest, energy is one of the simplest areas to get it compared. They are not trying to upsell you with 10Gb of mobile data a month (there’s no energy equivalent that I’m aware of), they literally provide one service that has a certain price. There’s not even a lot of marketing on top. You can easily get prices for each unit depending on your tariff, it’s not hidden. Comparing one against each other is relatively straighforward, but requires 30 mins to sit down and write it down. I did it because I hoped it would save me money (and it did, £300 a year 
).
I don’t particularly blame them for tariff diversity. If anything, I would blame switch websites for not being more helpful, they are focusing their efforts on ‘you could be saving £58375 a year’ type of incentives to switch. I probably didn’t look deep enough, but I didn’t find any easy way on 2 of those sites to compare unit prices directly. The lack of transparency is the reason why I would like Monzo to show tariff prices over “pay £50 a month” prices.
I totally agree about mobiles and broadband shenanigans, I would add all sorts of insurance to the list 
. When I was upgrading my broadband with Virgin Media, it took all my willpower and internal zen to not walk out when dude in a shop was trying to upsell me. It kinda went like that:
“Why on earth would I want landline number and no, I don’t have TV, so move on already, no , I don’t care it will be £15 less a month than all 3 separately, becuase I don’t have other 2 at all and NOOOOO, I DON’T WANT THEM, SHUT UP, I JUST WANT FASTER INTERNET, WAAARTHGHGHBULBULBUL.” 
Thanks for signing me up to the beta.
Initial thoughts:
(I’ve rambled in long form in Mortgage and Building Society Integration about mortgages!)
My thoughts:
when opening a savings account using the market place, dose this then show that savings account in app? like the balance?
No. For now, it just sends you to bank’s website where you can carry on creating/opening product with them directly. So Monzo doesn’t know about your Savings with that other bank, therefore can’t display any info in the app. This is beta, very beta, so - as someone mentioned in comments above - this is a glorified list of referral links. However, worth mentioning, those are hand-picked by Monzo (and for Savings Monzo gets no commission yet, so they really must be at least okay to be selected from thousands).
In the future, yes, Monzo promised more simplified sign-up process (less typing 
), and an option to see everything in one ‘place’.
