Just read the January update, some good things, also some alarming ideas. The upshot of my opinions on it are that, while in dealing with the richest people, you will always make the most money, Monzo should instead be a power for good and fairness and pursuit of wealth from any position. Here’s my tuppenceworth:
Mortgages - providing mortgage advice is a great idea. Please use L&C or SJP as an example and make sure it is fee free advice - commission earnings only… that’s what all the best growth companies do.
Insurance - another great idea. I think there’s definitely a gap in the market for insurance for people who struggle to get insurance, but for bizarre reasons. From my own perspective, being a musician and self employed means I am basically the devil to insurers (particularly for car insurance), yet I have never had an accident! Surely there is some way of fully monitoring someone’s driving and judging how good a driver someone actually is, based on their driving and nothing else. There’s hidden value here and this can be applied to other forms of insurance.
Monzo Plus - this sounds like a truly terrible idea, and will probably turn people away from monzo to other cards that don’t charge a fee for a full range of services, and impact on growth for short term monetary gains. Please don’t lock off parts of Monzo to only people that pay. OR make it so so so so cheap, that the cumulative earnings from it make it worthwhile in the end, and not scary to customers.
Savings, savings accounts, investments, all sound like great ideas. Is there a way of actually making Monzo into a mini Wealth Management app, offering people investment in Monzo-only funds, from low to high risk, like SJP would do? Using Monzo banked money of course. I’m sure there are some budding fund managers among us.
Another idea I had, was, Is there a way of incorporating some elements of a credit union into Monzo. Making its users part owners (the investors perhaps), with access to competitive rates of interest and other financial services. I believe it should be possible for Monzo to serve its people AND profit at the same time. Credit unions of considerable size are notoriously strong performers (they did very well comparatively to banks in the 2007 crisis) and Monzo could be a sort of hybrid one, of a huge global size.
I’m between jobs at the moment so if Monzo fancy offering me a job to action any of this that would be awesome! I’m a qualified CeMap mortgage advisor.