Testing Marketplace Beta

They might be gamed for the good reviews occasionally, but when you see a consistent history of shit reviews it’s always true in my experience. Examples include all telecoms providers and many big legacy companies.

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yeah, the shit reviews are often the most honest. And it’s usually easy to spot the competitors dishing shit, as it is normally obvious they’ve never been there, or have been written by barely literate third world minimum wage shops.

But I tend to avoid the trip advisor top spots nowadays, they are either coasting on previous good reviews or full of our transatlantic brethren too scared to venture off the beaten path.

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I’m guessing it’s to cover maintenance from the local grid team. Some areas use lots of underground cables to supply houses, others run everything overhead (including the feed into the house).

My rates with Bulb for South Devon are as follows:

Electricity Unit Rate: 13.829p per kWh
Electricity Standing Charge: 24.56p per day (£89.64 per year)
Gas Unit Rate: 2.942p per kWh
Gas Standing Charge: 24.56p per day (£89.64 per year)
Dual Fuel discount: £30/year

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Agreed - case and point below :joy::

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.vice.com/amp/en_uk/article/434gqw/i-made-my-shed-the-top-rated-restaurant-on-tripadvisor

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Hi again, thanks again for your feedback so far, it’s great to be able to bounce ideas around with you all. I’ll try respond to them below:

Agreed on the reminders, and certainly that we need to add value over and above comparison sites (at least for the vast majority of users)! On the Money Supermarket point, where does the greater benefit come from for you? Is it the wider choice of energy companies? And what are the key differences in friction?

Agree the pop-ups and one-tap sign-up would be really useful! Something we’re thinking about is how this flow might need to differ from product to product. For example, as you say, in savings most people seem to want a one-tap in-app experience to get the best interest rate and don’t need to interact with the provider other than to add/remove money. In energy there’s likely to be more engagement with the provider - meter readings, bill management etc, receiving credits - and so there might need to be a few more steps in between.

If we build something that scales well, I don’t see why not!

You’re spot on with all of your post @Avishai - we’re hearing that bills are a pain to read, they vary massively (some show you annual totals, some show you usage over the last period, some just repeat your meter readings). Most of the energy providers ask you to give them annual usage for a quote, so we might start with that, although I’m going to test whether this is actually the information people have to hand (as you say, I suspect not :slight_smile: .)

You cynic, you :wink: . We got a lot of feedback that a questionnaire to narrow options might be the good way to help people make a decision. If we did this I’d hope we’d be able to transparently explain the logic that got led to us making that recommendation, and what the other options would have been. And as ever, we’ll be super transparent on the commercial terms!

You’re right @anon44204028, there’s 13 energy regions in the UK, each of them has a different set of electricity generators. The costs probably vary based on those electricity generators, distribution network charges, and the purchasing power of your energy provider in that region.

Currently we’re using the postcode you’ve registered with your Monzo account to provide you with a regionalised average estimate, but as @Avishai mentions, we don’t give you the option to amend it yet.

Another idea I’ve had is a combination of filtering and sorting. Filters that allow you to condense the list - e.g. ‘show me only renewable providers’ or ‘show me only providers with a Trustpilot score above 9’ - and then a sorting method that allows you to rank based on one of these parameters, e.g. price, trustpilot. What do you think?

Would this be a good direction in your opinion @Chad? How do you think Monzo could differentiate ourselves further (as well as the simple / efficient application)?

__

I’ve also noted all the feedback on review sites and metrics too :slight_smile:

Let me know if you have any other thoughts!

Rich

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I think that would be a great way of doing it! Would save building all those tables and comparisons too.

Just a lot of claps for this response - very detailed and it’s great customer service to take the time to do so :slight_smile:

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I really like this idea very useful.

However one complaint. It takes too long to load sometimes I wonder if my app is frozen :joy:

Really interesting to hear your detailed thoughts on this thread, this kind of feedback about features and plans is great and is why I come back to this forum. Thank you!

We are not sure the entry point would be on the Accounts tab in the future or whether it’d warrant a separate tab.

I’d be fine with marketplace under Accounts (not Account as at present), but it should be much more prominent - perhaps though when you add a new Account (not a Pot) you could be presented with the marketplace instead (with monzo pots being one option out of many)?

A a new tab feels too prominent, as how often are users going to open new accounts?

I love the filtering and sorting idea, think this is much better than a separate comparison feature.

I do think it matters less after the account is open if you have to talk to the partner if you want to do something tricky like transfer another isa in or change account details - complex operations can be manual initially. From my perspective what’s important is (in order of importance):

  1. A frictionless experience of opening an account
  2. Letting you transfer money from Monzo to the new account
  3. Letting you see some sort of balance summary in Monzo (this could come later)
  4. Letting you get money back into monzo accounts (this could come later)

Other things like having to contact the partner separately to update details etc don’t really matter much and would be fine - for most banking products they are very rare, so I’d focus on the opening experience.

2, 3, 4 would hopefully be dealt with by open banking APIs, but the no 1 would have to be some sort of integration - I’d be in favour of trying your route no 1 to tackle opening, as the second option you give still requires the partner to do some development work, and the first option you get to control the experience, control what information is shared, and control the presentation of it to customers, and in some ways the integration is simpler for the partner (you send them info encrypted, they return either rejection or account details). So I’d lean towards 1 simply because sign up with monzo would probably be done badly by lots of partners, leading to a bad disjointed experience not much better than this existing referral scheme, and crucially you’d have to present in-app in webviews (which people don’t trust) or take the user out to the browser (bad experience). Maybe there’s a place for both though - starting with log in with monzo if that’s easier and getting some on board with a more integrated experience later.

The best experience for the user is probably to do everything inside the Monzo app with just a few clicks to open an account.

Thanks for engaging with us like this - it’s great! :smile:

So it’s not just Money Supermarket per se, but more a commentary about the way that I (currently) tend to work. There’s momentum at work here - I tend to fire up comparison websites, so someone like Monzo is going to have to offer better value to disrupt my learnt workflow. As this market grows, I’m getting more and more emails from credit reference agencies, comparison websites and others that hold my data, trying to find the ‘best deal’ for me. How does Monzo differentiate?

Secondly, (I think) I can get a more or less comprehensive view of the market from a bit of quick googling / comparison websites. Monzo’s not there yet (it’s still early, so no worries on that front at the moment :wink:) - but if you aspire to be like a comparison website, I’d ask what can you do over and above to change my ‘go to’ way of doing things? And if you will only offer a subset of the market, where’s the differential - deep integration in the app? Better value? Again, I’d need to know why Monzo’s the best option, particularly if I need to make the effort to hunt it out.

On the friction point, I’m not sure that an app is the best way of researching and selecting additional accounts - and, as discussed, the marketplace is kinda hidden away at the moment.

For something big and serious (such as a mortgage) I’ll probably have a spreadsheet out, be consulting lots of websites (including the comparison sites) and making a long and informed decision. If the right option for me is available through Monzo - and it’s the (more or less) the best value option, I’d be inclined to open it through you, but couldn’t guarantee it. For something small, I might be prompted to impulse open (e.g. a savings account). So my friction comment was more about the interface, I think. If you could automagically KYC me with the new supplier, integrate it into the Monzo app etc, then that begins to change the game, for me at least.

Essentially, I think I’m looking for a differentiator - what makes Monzo a better option for me? I think this is probably around two things: a) can I use it through the Monzo app? (i.e. becoming my financial control centre); b) how can you ethically use the data you hold about me to guide my decisions and help me make more informed selections?

(Random thought: did you ever move forward with some of your early thinking of ‘log on with :monzo: Monzo’ - using open auth so you can log into websites with your Monzo credentials like we can with Google or Facebook ones? I’m wondering if, an alternative / complementary service to the marketplace, might be to offer open auth [1] + KYC [2] as a service for other providers - so if I want to take out insurance with provider X, I use open auth to sign in and passport over my Monzo KYC checks. A different model, but maybe much more scaleable?)

I hope this is all helpful stuff! :smiley:

[1] OAuth - Wikipedia
[2] Know Your Customer (Know your customer - Wikipedia)

I’m gonna switch to bulb through this later :slightly_smiling_face:

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I’ve read through most of the comments so far and haven’t seen this mentioned yet, might just me being a little picky but I notice on the savings section for the Shawbrook Bank fixed rate bonds it shows “min. £1-5,000”. But when clicking through shows £1000 or £5000, would this not be clearer to show min. £1000-5000 as to me it appears to be showing you can open with just £1 which considering the account type is pretty much guaranteed not to be the case before you click through but could just be a little clearer beforehand. Especially as presumably soon there will be accounts that you can open with £1 that could make it more confusing for instance if there was a sort by minimum opening balance.

Like I said might just me being picky but thought I’d throw it out there.

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Do you get £50 credit going via Monzo though?

£25 I believe

Maybe, however Monzo really need a further category for masseuse and sauna type health/spa services

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We’ve added investments! :moneybag:

Today, we’ve added Investments as a new category to the Marketplace Beta. Many of you gave us feedback on the kinds of categories you’d like to see next. Investments was the most popular suggestion: 63% of you asked us to add it.

So, now you’ll see a range of different products and providers, and be able to see and compare key information about each one.

We’d like to know which products and providers you like or find useful, as well as any improvements you’d like us to make to the way you see, compare, or actually sign up to use any of these products.

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Great to see WiseAlpha appearing

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Relevant (some of OakNorth’s savings accounts are in the marketplace, the other challenger’s aren’t [yet]) -

From looking at the Wealthify website the fees listed in the Monzo app are different? Can you confirm they are listed correctly?

Great th see the additions though! Nice choice!