As promised we want to give you a teaser on something we are starting to explore and that we think you’re going to love, travel reports.
We know alphas love to travel the world so we want to take that forward and start giving you the right tools to help you to predict and categorise your spending.
This is still rough (including my unmistakable Spanglish all over the place) but the idea is:
The moment we detect you are out of the UK (either because you gave us permission to record your location or because you’ve used your card abroad) we’ll send you a notification with the current exchange rate, tips on how to use your card abroad (preferred ATMs or banks to use abroad, ask to be charged in the local currency to avoid unfair conversions, etc.) and an easy switch to set all the upcoming transactions automatically as expenses or holidays.
Once you are back home we’ll send you another report highlighting how much you’ve saved in fees (it feels awesome!) and maybe a map with the locations you visited and a small summary on your spending (that way you can review that every transaction is correct).
Again, this is just a rough first iteration but we’d love to hear what kind of tools would you expect from us when you are abroad. How can we help you to enjoy your Mondo cards abroad even more?
How much you have saved compared to what ?Lloyds bank exchange rate , post office currency rate, CC rate ? I think it would be a bit meaningless because Lloyds for example charge £1 per transaction whatever the amount + 2.99% of the transaction amount, if I had 20 transactions of £10 in a bar I would save a fortune, if I had 1 transaction in a bar of £200 - id still be drunk , but would have saved £19 on transaction fees, if I had used a Halifax CC Id have saved the transaction fees but wouldn’t have known for a month until my next paper statement how much it had cost to get drunk - If I had used Mondo Id still be drunk but paid no fees to get there and known straight away- well until at least half way through the night ! . NOT THAT I DRINK A LOT
If possible Id like the top up amount to be displayed in local currency and GBP so I know how much I have to top up to cover a bill - however will we still need top ups when you are a bank and its a main account …hmmmm
I love this! Particularly like the option to automatically tag all transactions as expenses or holiday. This is miles ahead of anything I have seen from other banks.
Edit: in retrospect (though I still love it!) I wonder whether the prominence of the how much ive saved on the welcome home is the best thing - I already know that Mondo is great for travelling! As a user it is not my #1 piece of information I want when returning home. That said, I cant immediately think what else I would want and the info below is good so not sure what else to suggest!
I know you said its only a rough first iteration but I think this is beautiful and looks like it has all the information I would need when travelling. I think this feature is really starting to show what Mondo is all about.
Exchange rate when arriving in country would be a good feature. Even better would be a notification after a purchase to indicate how much you’ve spent both in the foreign currency and in GBP.
I use the xe app a lot and to build some of this exchange rate functionality into the app would be a game changer
Hugo, looks very good and compelling - though I do agree with one of the other comments that you may need to caveats the savings you highlight, since there are a few other banks/cards that offer good rates too.
I’ve noticed that many people who are unused to travel are not so good at using exchange rates to convert between currencies - and many people’s arithmetic leaves them struggling. Have you considered a currency calculator tool to help such customers?
The use case might be:
Customer arrives in country x - say Switzerland
Customer receives a notification containing the exchange rate - say GBP 1 = CHF 1.47
Whenever the app is opened and detects the customer is still abroad, the exchange rate is looked up and is displayed
The customer then has the option to enter calculator mode, to enter an amount in the local currency, whereupon the approximate exchange rate is applied and the corresponding indicative amount is shown in GBP
I’ve thought this through for a while and produced a mock-up, which I’d be happy to share with you
I like the idea of the currency calculator - although it would need to be easy to access, I wouldn’t want to flick through several screens to get the the currency converter. Maybe the app will know I’m abroad and offer the option to have a floating currency converter icon or add a new tab at the bottom or at the top of the screen somewhere so its 1 click away when launching the app?
It would also be nice for it to operate in an offline mode to save on data roaming charges
Agree absolutely. Customer could have the option to choose between full roaming or update by wifi only - since most customers wouldn’t need it to be more accurate than updating it once a day would make it
This looks pretty cool, and as a frequent traveller I’d love to try it out!
I’m holidaying in Canada and the USA for the next three weeks (instead of work for a change!) and knowing how much I saved in real terms from exchange rates is a useful piece of information.
More generally when I’m travelling for work, this sort of summarised report is great to help me figure out what I need to give to my company in terms of receipts and expense reporting. A step further than this would be to allow exporting of expenses data directly for use in another “company approved” expenses tool (Expensify, Concur, Excel sheet etc).
Yep! Love this, can’t wait to use it.
I am travelling a lot at the moment and just the fact that I can instantly see how much I have spent in UKP is invaluable.
I’ve just got back from a weekend in Copenhagen and liberally used my Mondo card with small street traders, in a supermarket, buying train tickets and also with Uber; I didn’t have a single issue.
Also knowing that I wasn’t going to be ripped off with fees felt great
I was in Bulgaria over the weekend, and had some problems using the card. I’d say acceptance was about 50/50 with some retailers and ATMs taking the card and some terminals rejecting it as an invalid card. My hotel, for example, took the card fine but the Sofia Metro ticket machines didn’t.
I found that those ATMs where it would work recognised it as needing English language straight away, while if it asked me to select a language it rejected the card. Postbank and Банка ДСК (Banka DSK) ATMs were fine, but UniCredit BulBank ATMs weren’t.
The idea of a currency calculator is appealing - if you could also set sales taxes which could be included in the calculation before conversion - that would solve most of my issues when purchasing internationally
Sales tax info would be super helpful, especially when it varies across states, like in the US - maybe a simple notification of the rate when you cross state/city lines, or if you could stick in your itinerary (not sure on the specifics of this, maybe linked to email or a travel planning app) it could tell you where the best place on your trip to make large value purchases is
When looking at the total spend, it would be good to be able to also include costs in the run up to the trip, like flights, accommodation etc. In essence you’d have a total spend whilst abroad, and total spend.
This looks awesome, I’m not totally sure about the auto categorising to expenses or holiday as I like the breakdown into the categories as it is.
What I would really like though is to automatically assign all transactions to a hashtag. I just posted in feature requests Separate Hashtag Entry about a separate hashtag entry form I’ve put an example in that post about usage as well.
