Excellent to hear. Intercom is ok when using it, but the alert interactions and interface to reach ongoing conversations is awful, and there are other little issues.
Also, you score 
on emoji use 
. Really enjoyable to read! 
2 Likes
Hi everyone! 
Thanks for the nomination @constantijn! A slightly belated update from me since I was on holidays (a roller derby convention!) in sunny Barcelona last week 
️
This week was very exciting for us as we split the Core team into the Platform team 
and Payments team 
!
Our new team is responsible for everything related to payments and card operations. We’re working on making sure you can buy anything with your current account card (Mastercard), send money instantly to other bank accounts (Faster Payments) and set up Direct Debits (Bacs).
The team is in charge of the infrastructure at Monzo. They’re the people designing the systems that the bank runs on top of, making sure that everything runs safely and smoothly and that we stay connected 
to all our partners, like the payment networks.
This week the team was working hard to make sure we can offer “unassisted" signup ASAP 
. Unassisted means (amongst other things) that you can sign up for a current account in the app store version of the Monzo app, and have a card (with your name on it! 
) arrive at your door.
We’ve also been improving our Bacs processing. To handle Direct Debits and Direct Credits (e.g. salary payments 
) we need to do two things: automatically download payment files from the Bacs network and manually upload reports. This week I was working on making sure we can re-process files that we’ve downloaded before as many times as we want without duplicating 
the payments inside them. @daniel.cannon was making the uploading of reports less manual by batching up all the files into one so that it only has to be uploaded once a day.
Guillaume, you’re up next!
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Hey everyone,
Thank you @anon82263394! I’m Guillaume (pronounce it Gui-yomeu 
). I’m an engineer here at Monzo and I’m part of the new Platform team . We are focused on making sure the infrastructure is perfect to run a bank 
; Here are some things I’ve been working on in the last … 6 months 
- Every time something happens on the platform a bunch of events are fired to perform tasks such as augmenting the transaction with relevant information and emoji. We use a tool called NSQ to do this, and I’m migrating the platform to Kafka because it better fit our needs.
- I also started working on improving the way store our metrics
, because we have reached the limits of our current solution. The metrics are vital to us, as they allow us to monitor the platform.
In other news, we currently have 676 activated current accounts and we’re working hard to deploy more of them 
.
Ho! … and I’m also the on-call engineer for this week:man_firefighter:… So If anything goes wrong 
on Thursday night at 3am while you try to buy your last drink 
, I’ll be the guy in front of his computer who makes sure everything run smoothly on the backend side 
I nominate @robinm for the next one … 
Have an awesome week!
7 Likes
Do they call you ‘Will’ at the office? I’m struggling to pronounce your name and I’m getting funny looks in the office here 
Hahah @BobT ! Everyone is really good at saying my name 
so I don’t need to use a simpler one
2 Likes
I hope you are not just saying that! 
Hi everyone I’m Robin. I’m a software engineer working in the Internal Product team.
I’m currently working with @constantijn to make it possible to receive and respond to your support emails from within our internal tools 
. Our team’s job is to build the tools that give the COps team super powers and we think that by deeply integrating messaging into our tools we’ll be much more effective at responding to your queries .
This week I’ve been adding support for real time events in our web tools platform. When you send us a message we want it to be displayed in our tools in real time (the COps team shouldn’t have to refresh the conversation to see the latest message). This has been a fun project because it has involved making changes in both our backend systems (which are written in Go) and our web tools (which use JavaScript).
Whilst engineers in all of the teams at Monzo contribute to the web tools, being able to work across the full stack is particularly important in our team. Switching between the frontend and backend and the two different languages can be confusing at times (imagine spending a morning speaking German 
and an afternoon speaking French! 
) but it has been really rewarding to be able to implement the whole system myself.
Messaging is just one example of where real time events could be useful in our internal tools. If one of the COps team were investigating some fraudulent activity on an account, we might want to notify them in real time when a suspicious transaction was detected . Or, if someone in the lending team was carrying out a procedure that involved uploading and processing files, we could notify them when the processing was complete so they didn’t have to keep checking back 
.
Even though we’re only using it for messaging at the moment, we’ve built the real time functionality in such a way that it can support all of these use cases (and new ones we’ve not even thought about yet).
By thinking in this this way we hope to give our fellow engineers super powers too 
Next up is @anon59632031 
12 Likes
Hey everyone!
Due to there being many many James’ at Monzo I’m known by my nickname to make things a bit easier 
As @robin hinted at, I’m a big fan of and try to play at the office whenever I have a spare 5 minutes!
I work in the Fincrime & Security team as a security analyst here at Monzo. Our team looks after a wide range of work streams including fighting fraud on the operational side 
, building secure and robust systems on the engineering side 
and many things in-between!
I’m currently focussed on improving our laptop provisioning process for new employees starting at Monzo. Since the early days of Monzo we have been using simple methods to provision our laptops to make them secure and ready to be used by our staff.
As we have grown, this process has become somewhat difficult and time consuming. We need a provisioning process that can continue to scale at a pace close to our growth .
I’ve just rolled out an MDM (mobile device management) solution to Monzo laptops. This means our laptops are now centrally managed and our standard software, security policies and updates can be pushed out to our devices in one click instead of having to be individually configured 
.
This is a huge first step towards my dream of automating our entire laptop setup process. Next on my list is to tie in Apple’s DEP (device enrolment program) and custom scripting to achieve zero touch provisioning (or as close to it as we can get). This will look something like this:
- Buy a MacBook from Apple
- The device will be permanently recognised as a Monzo device on Apple’s servers
- We turn the new laptop on and connect it to a WiFi network
- Apple recognises the device as owned by Monzo and tells it our MDM enrolment URL (this also stops a stolen device being used by anyone else other than at Monzo!)
- Our MDM then automatically enrols the device into our environment which will do the following:
- Installs all of our standard software
- Updates MacOS
- Configures security profiles (such as encryption)
- Runs custom scripts to setup user accounts and many other nice things
The idea here is that we can turn laptops on, let the process run and then come back to them when they have been completed. This not only gives our engineers their time back for other pieces of work but also ensures that every laptop is configured in exactly the right way and therefore eliminating human error 
.
If you have any questions about my role or what I’m working on, please don’t hesitate to shout!
Next up is @anon56040506!
13 Likes
What MDM are you using? JAMF? Another?
1 Like
Was just about to ask that! Personally I use Meraki as its free for under 100 devices and it has really come in handy.
We went for Fleetsmith which has been awesome Jamf Pro looked great too, it was a serious contender but in the end the more modern feel and ease of use of Fleetsmith swayed us.
1 Like
Thanks, @anon59632031 
Always good to hear what other people are using. I’ll take a look at that and see how it compares to JAMF. Thanks 
Interesting stuff, @anon59632031!
Does your post imply that everyone at Monzo uses a MacBook and macOS, then?
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I use Cisco Meraki MDM for my stuff
1 Like
Correct! 
4 Likes
Hey there everyone!
First of all, apologies for the delay getting this posted - last week was an awfully busy one!
I work in the ever-growing Customer Operations team here at Monzo. I have recently moved over from the pre-paid scheme to the current account, where I have taken a bit of a step back from frontline customer support.
So what have I been working on? Well, I have taken on the task of managing merchant acceptance. This involves chasing merchants to update their systems to recognise our sort code and our card BIN. The community has already done an amazing job at this, so I want to thank all of you for helping improve the Monzo experience! 
This has proven to be a bit of an uphill struggle, and progress is painfully slow. I’m hoping that these acceptance issues will start to disappear organically - assuming most merchants update their systems periodically. Either way, we will get there in the end!
I have also been working on our internal documentation - trying to ensure that we have a comprehensive guide for when we start migrating the Customer Support team over to the current account. It is really important that our team have the tools and training they need to support our customers as best they can, so this is a job I am pretty excited about!
Finally, I am jumping on the in-app chat for the current account when I am needed. It’s great hearing everyone’s feedback, so keep it coming!
If anyone has any questions, just ask!
Next up is @anon9379844
11 Likes
I love this thread. So interesting to see the ins and outs of Monzo.
Hi everyone
I joined Monzo this week as a User Researcher and will be working alongside our 
designers to help ensure that as Monzo grows, we keep building features and functions that are usable, valuable and above all delightful 
.
We’re going to continue running regular user testing and will host one-on-one sessions throughout particular days, depending on what’s coming up 
. We’ll also we’ll be conducting longer-term qualitative research studies to understand what Monzo could do to help you track and manage your money more easily on a day-to-day basis 
.
If you’d like to be involved in user research and help us build the best bank in the world, please pop your details in the 
form here 
and I’ll be in touch when we need your eyes and thoughts on something 
.
I’m very excited about having more input from customers earlier on in the design process and learning from it 
. It might even just inspire a blog post or two, let’s see! 
14 Likes
All done!
Good luck in the new role Samantha! I’m sure you’ll smash it!
1 Like