I agree with your point, but for me I don’t like cash because in my house we work off very tight budgets… having loose change lying around or bank notes in your wallet increases the chance of them being wasted on something needless…
For example, none of my local chinese takeaways are on Just Eat, so cash is the only option… I’ve saved a fortune by not having cash in the house when I’ve been craving a chow mein! 
A biased source isn’t necessarily a useless source. All sources are useful (basic GCSE/A-Level History); what matters is the degree of usefulness.
In this case, depending on your perspective, the CEO can either be the best (in the sense that he is an expert in the field of cash) or worst (he may well have conflicts of interest) source. However, this is not a binary situation, hence the need for critical evaluation which is the basis of any balanced argument as I already explained. So long as the provenance is weighed up, the experts findings can be useful.
Either way, his findings are better than a unsubstantiated conjecture from a layman that “cash is bad for everyone” 
No. But with services such as a Emma soon needing to make money hawking ‘anonymised’ data, I don’t think it’s such a leap.
They already give away Apple watches in return for health data.
Totally agreed. Stop putting the blame on monzo users. Either the business model works or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t we’ll just use another bank.
I’ve actually dug up one of my monthly cash withdrawals just to read this message - I have never noticed ir.
I don’t see where they are blaming users - they are just asking users to use their card on a day-to-day basis instead of withdrawing cash, if they can.
This is clearly an attempt to drive down costs - which makes sense, as they have said that their similar approach to reducing debit card too-upz has worked really well.
They have clearly made the calculation that this won’t hurt their customer numbers - and it doesn’t, as their daily signups still exceed 2.5K on average - which is why I don’t see the noise in this thread changing their strategy.
Fact is, most people I know, both those on Monzo/Starling and on traditional banks, already avoid cash whenever they can. I would also assume that the average Monzo user is less likely to heavily rely on cash than traditional bank account holders since one of its selling points are budgeting tools.
To conclude my post, I’ll say this. Every business defines their target audience to aid in product development - the heavy cash user is clearly not one of them, in my view. Which is why I think their messaging makes total sense.
To conclude my post, I’ll say this. Every business defines their target audience to aid in product development - the heavy cash user is clearly not one of them, in my view. Which is why I think their messaging makes total sense.
Totally agree with it. Whoever’s offended by that message in the app are welcome to go back to legacy. 
So basically don’t give your critical opinions on Monzo. Shut up and put up or leave 
Not what I meant - I welcome discussion, but I feel like some responses on here were way over the top IMO, as if Monzo was actually preventing them from taking out cash.
Cool! Does that mean they’ll cut my premiums?
Very good points!
As for where I’d disagree with (based purely on the graphic: I haven’t read the article - we are on the internet after all! ):
Legal tender status. While true that only cash is legal tender (to be precise some forms of cash for some forms of payment), this (a) really doesn’t matter for the vast majority of payments, as the legal tender status rarely comes into play when you are paying something, and (b) is entirely arbitrary, and there is no reason why this could not change over night.
Convenience: This is completely subjective, and I certainly wouldn’t put a tick there for cash. I find cash handling very inconvenient: Need to go to ATM, withdraw cash, count it out for payment, check my change, then deal with the change. This is plain annoying. (And I remeber when I did part time work in the local supermarket: cash handling was a royal PITA! [Incidentally, it was when I started counting tills’ cash at the end of day that I realised how stupid German businesses are, for discouraging card payments: With the amount of time and thus money wasted on counting, recounting, and double checking cash it was astounding to me that we didn’t encourage our customers to pay by card!])
Availability: This will depend on where in the country you are. It’s also not inherent to cash, and the easy availability of cash can by a real source of problems (at least that’s what I learned in history lessons re the Weimar Republic, but then I’m not an economist, so I may have misunderstood things)
Reliablity: Well, I’d love to know their reason for the scoring they give. I can tell you, based on were I used to live: The internet and internet payments are not reliable!
Efficient: Well, if you don’t call cash payments inefficient, then I can’t help you
Absolutely share your opinions 
. More that in this case be realistic and realise that Monzo probably don’t agree with you. If they did they never would have added the message in this first place
Monzo has so many customers and we’re all people with different views, opinions and beliefs. IMO it’s okay for Monzo to not perfectly match my every desire … It’d be impossible for it to do that without leaving a lot of others dissatisfied and that would be very selfish of me 
I reckon it does mean premiums may appear to go down for some – they’ll certainly market it as the main benefit to getting access to your biology and wallet – but be prepared for every single life choice contributing to their excuse for not paying out.
“Sorry Will, your steps per day/McDonald’s ratio is in deficit, and you went to the cinema and scoffed a bag of Revels instead of going to the gym. You’re now not covered for any heart attacks in the next five years”
Of course, if you go back to buying unhealthy stuff with cash…
Likewise & I appreciate your response (& don’t have any strong disagreements with it tbh 
)
I agree legal tender status is unique to cash, but is not relevant to everyday payments. Also, legal tender status is bestowed by the Central Bank only to the money it mints which I guess is arbitrary but certainly wouldn’t change overnight.
Convenient in the sense of money’s role as a fungible medium of exchange, unit of account and fully liquid store of value. The alternative is a barter economy which is less convenient, but yes I agree in practicality there are the inconveniences that you describe.
The Central Bank and Banking System do pretty good job on ensuring money supply satisfies money demand. There may be local issues, say in rural areas, but generally across the economy this isn’t the case.
Reliability… generally yes.
Efficiency isn’t binary, so while we can’t say cash is inefficient, we also should be wary of saying it’s 100% efficient. It’s curcumstantial, so I’ll just leave this one.
Probably not quite overnight. But my point was: I don’t see why the BoE (or government, or parliament, or whoever has this authority in this country) couldn’t change the rules around legal tender, if they wanted to.
@bea In the interests of Monzo’s openness to transparency, can we have an official company article on how Monzo as an aspiring ‘Smart Bank’ views the ethics of nudging customer behaviour?
Is there a problem with nudging? It’s not coercive or subliminal.
I don’t think there’s an issue in this case as the “nudging” is done transparently; we’re not talking about scenarios like when Facebook silently altered what’s displayed in user’s timelines for some kind of “research”.
tbf, you’d only notice it if you went to edit the note/category which you might not do for cash withdrawals. I don’t remember seeing this message in March, but I was in a rush (the message has been applied retroactively to all)…
“It costs Monzo significant amounts of money when you withdraw cash.”
“please use your card in shops and restaurants” ← their bolding, not mine
It’s you and your fault costing Monzo significant amounts of money. Literally the first two lines.
I don’t want to be told to think about my ATM habits for 11 withdrawals in 19 months. But Monzo haven’t said what’s sustainable.
Which just the message even more confusing. You’re telling me they can’t support the generation that doesn’t use atms. What hope do they have offering it to anyone else?
Except Monzo is trying to be a big bank, not a bank targeting a group. And the big boys offer something called a basic bank account. One of the voluntary points of offering a BBA is free cash withdrawals. It’s a key basic banking feature, not something new like top-ups.
It’s odd them raising this out of the blue, without a “well this didn’t work, what next?”.
6 months ago they were saying “£16 per active user per year” was too expensive. At 17p, that’s 94 withdrawals or roughly once every 4 days. So everyone withdrawing twice a week appears unsustainable - say once for a night out and once for spare change.
They do want to to be a big bank. While I haven’t seen anything about “cash-related targeting”, Tom Blomfield did say in an interview that the bank wouldn’t satisfy everyone’s needs, but rather those who “live” on their smartphone. I would assume about 80% of those don’t withdraw cash on a daily basis.
It’s comes under the area of behavioural psychology which can be often subliminal.
The most popular post in this thread is quoted (below) and the point is not that nudging is wrong, but how the nudge is done in a manner in which not to make the consumer feel “guilty”. When an employee mentions that’s nudging is operational, then given Monzo has no problems in being transparent, I want to hear their view on their approach to it. Is this clearer? @anon23935806