“2019 was also a big year financially. Our annual revenue grew by 240% from £19.7m last year to £67.2m. Our lending business also grew, with total balances increasing from £19.2m to £143.9m. In addition, more people are trusting us to hold and manage their money - deposits held at Monzo increased from £461.8m to £1.4bn. We continued to make significant up front investment in growing our business and as such, our full year net loss also increased - from £47.2m to £113.8m. To help fund this investment and to keep us in a strong financial position we raised an additional £113m of funding from new investors.”
As an investor, I think it’s fair to take what Monzo say with a bit of salt.
After all, they also state:
And lastly, we’ve made plenty of quality-of-life improvements. You might have already noticed improved self-service flows throughout the app to help you get your questions answered faster than ever.
Especially given the concerns that the Bank of England has raised about the business model of new banks.
This feels like a total whitewash and written like a sales pitch, rather than an honest and transparent shareholder update.
A lot of emphasis is given to worthless top line growth numbers and little or none given to important things a shareholder would actually want to know such as bottom line losses or the fact that their investnent value has halved on paper, or why the CEO and entire Board at last update are no longer in place.
Having said that… great progress on the comms front by actually doing an update! Thank you Team Monzo!
I agree it is quite “vanilla” but in reality Im afraid that us crowd cube shareholders will only be as updated as every other user of Monzo within 5 minutes of this “shareholder report” being published , the “shareholder report” won’t be telling all and sundry - well this is our plan for the next 3 - 6 - 12 months, 2 years , these are the things that are losing us money and this is what we intend to do about it - these are the things that are making us money and we are going to do A B and C because they are all 17%, or whatever percentage profit making for us - the big shareholders will have much more of an insight , rightly or wrongly to the commercially sensitive information we all crave
While it’s true that the content isn’t particularly enlightening, I think it’s encouraging that there has at least been an update. It shows that the crowdfunding contingent hasn’t been entirely forgotten even with the current challenges that Monzo and the industry face.
It’s also worth remembering that there will be plenty of crowdfunders who won’t be as engaged as some of the denizens of this forum, and won’t have read the annual report either, so it’s still worth doing even with the admittedly thin content.
Anyway, a step in the right direction. Thanks, Monzo!
I’m a crowdfunding investor, but didn’t get the email as these are tied to Monzo account emails (can’t open one unfortunately as I’m not from the UK). If anyone feels like forwarding it to me, send me a DM. Thanks!
There were other investors from the first round with the same problem.
I’ve contacted Monzo about it and they were looking for a solution.
Can image more important stuff going on at the moment (+ probably not too much other investors who can’t create an account), so am happy if I can access them one way or another. (someone offered to forward it in the meantime, thanks!)
