Please look at becoming a B-Corp, Monzo. 
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That would be a nice thing
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I really don’t get the obsession with Open Banking!
Monzo will have the data on how many people connect how many accounts, maybe people use it, or maybe if they take it away from Plus, it’s not that people will downgrade, just that there’s one less thing to list as a benefit to subscribe in the first place.
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I have to admit I like it. It’s great to be able to see all your account data in one place although to be fair I’m not sure anyone does this fully atm. R-
Edit: before I get pulled over by the pedant police I appreciate the gaps in data caused by investments being largely ignored as far as I can tell and not all banks [Chase for example] signing up. However it’s pretty good for my purposes.
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Loving the open and healthy debate on this one. I have to say I think there’s a line and on this one Monzo have, probably, done the right thing. But it does leave me questioning - what more could be done?
Will allowing people to see trends for free really help with the cost of living crisis? I’m not sure - but also what else could monzo really do?
As an addition to this, I would love to see considerations around waiving plus fee’s, giving people trials etc to see if they could explore the rest of plus for a while without having a financial commitment to it.
I’m aware monzo has to make money somewhere, but for me Plus probably isn’t it. That’s for another thread however. Looking forward to seeing what happens next with trends
I’d agree, but in my experience (Monzo and elsewhere) the data comes and goes fairly randomly to the extent that I find it more convenient to just use a spreadsheet and individual apps.
Things may have improved in the last 12 months or so since I’ve used it, I suppose.
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Yes - I think this is while trends, while useful, was not what I used for this sort of thing. The data is too inconsistent and often you need to manually over-ride. Plus things don’t really change (at least for me) all that much month to month.
Personally I’d love trends (and who knows) to become more about insights vs raw data. Or at least both.
For example, for Monzo to really help having the data plus insights to help you take actions might really help nudge towards better spending habits.
For example, on NatWest you can do both - see where the money is going plus note at a glance where you are with things “Your phone bill will be xx more this month” “If you reduce your budget by xx you’ll save yy” etc.
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I’m using the free version of Nova atm. I had Premium for a year and the only useful thing [for me] was being able to view transactions older than 8 weeks old. I use it really just to keep tabs on DD’s and SO’s and have a top line liquid cash figure. R-
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Fascinating the time and effort you all put into analysing and refining your budgeting.
I put my money aside for mortgage and bills, pay myself in savings and investments as much as it takes to get down to my nominal living costs, then just live off the balance until pay day comes around again.
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Mines just send to joint account to cover essential stuff, revolut (now kroo) for own spends.
Never relied on or intend to use Trends. Revolut has analytics which tells me almost the same stuff for free.
In last few months, it’s impossible to view separate currency Trends, eg Euro spending through Revolut 
It was all okay summer time, until it was obviously changed 
Now, every time I tap on Euro Trends, it always leads me to GBP Trends 
Same issue with CHF & USD 
Customer support response was
I don’t get, why need to change as it was very helpful to have separate Trends for separate currencies 
“the Trends tab pulls from the current account primarily and not connected accounts”
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It is now, looks like
It was no problem a few months ago on any of my connected accounts 
Hi everyone, I’m Aris, and I work in our Plus and Premium team. There’s a good debate going on here; in the classic Monzo spirit of transparency, I want to offer our take on some of the points of view raised.
We have done the maths, and actually this one isn’t in our favour! As Rore said, the main reason for making the graphs free is that we think it’s the right thing to do, especially in light of the cost of living crisis.
When the graphs were only accessible with Monzo Plus or Premium, we found they drove a meaningful number of signups to those accounts. By making them accessible to everyone we’re expecting the growth of Monzo Plus customers to slow down a little. And some people may even cancel their subscriptions if the main reason they signed up was to access the charts.
We’re always looking at how the external market is developing, how our product propositions (current account, Plus and Premium) stack up against competitors, and how that impacts growth. Over the long term, if some of our Plus and Premium features became table stakes, we’d expect that to impact people signing up to Monzo in the first place (which hasn’t happened yet). It’s something we’re always assessing!
It’s true other banks offer open banking for free, but we genuinely believe our open banking is better than what you’ll find elsewhere. What you’re paying for is not really open banking: it’s what Trends can do when you connect external accounts.
We have done a lot of work to clean up the data we receive through open banking, so your transactions with other banks are more likely to be classified into the correct category and merchant. Balance and spending view work as well with external accounts as they do with your Monzo transactions. We think this is a superior experience to what you get with open banking from our competitors, which is why we think it’s fair to charge for it.
Believe me, we are doing this! This is a very interesting question, and not that easy to answer. As you might expect, when people are really engaged with Monzo Plus and Premium features, this correlates with higher overall revenue - but is it causing it? Or is it that the kind of users who are more engaged (and therefore generate higher revenue) are also more likely to use Paid features?
While we’re at it, could it in fact even be the case that paying for Plus or Premium causes people to become more engaged, not because of the features in Plus and Premium but because committing to a subscription encourages our users to move more of their financial life on Monzo?
All good questions that we’re trying to answer 
And yes, the modelling and data analysis on this is fascinating!
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Could this extend to this..
Or do the sums not work here?
Great post. Thank you for sharing Monzo’s thoughts here 
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All interesting points! I think the key question for me, though, is how this works over time. Let me explain.
When Plus was launched, we were in a low interest environment. It’s an oversimplification, but Monzo needed to differentiate itself through software - and then charge for it - to survive.
But now we’re in a different place. Interest rates are rising and Monzo could (hypothesis) make more money from having money deposited with it than from subscription fees. So the incentives on Monzo are different and, I’d argue, would ultimately mean fewer pay walled features because you want to entice that cash in that you’re making all the money off.
My point, I suppose, is how do you build a differentiated product that survives a cyclical market? Should you even try?
Now, sad as it might be, I’m not expecting an answer to this. But I’d be super keen to understand if the argument resonates or whether I’ve missed the point.
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That’s true, and we are asking the same questions; the argument definitely resonates and you haven’t missed the point at all.
There is some nuance here: basically, you can argue that Paid features can do three things, besides being used to entice people to pay subscription fees. 1) They can entice new users to sign up to Monzo; 2) they can convince existing users to remain with Monzo, instead of moving to another bank; and 3) they can entice existing users to move more of their financial life to Monzo (from other banks they may have). (2) and (3) are hard to evaluate, but it is at least possible to make an educated guess as to whether they are happening. (1) is almost impossible to evaluate. On the other hand, the impact of releasing some features to Free users is much easier to evaluate, and the impact is much more direct and immediate.
So, it’s not that we’re not having these discussions internally, we absolutely are; it’s that these discussions are difficult to resolve 
And indeed, as evidenced by this post, sometimes we do make the decision to release some features to all users, and not always for financial reasons!
To your wider question, how do we build a differentiated product, that’s also something we’re asking ourselves, and I think it’s an even harder question than the previous one! I don’t think that doing away with our subscription products is the only way to differentiate though.
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Really interesting response, thanks for taking the time to write it. Would be interested to see if other “paid for” features have also been considered as a release and whether you could share any hypothesis, if you are able to.
Sounds like a good level of experimentation and evolution to work out what the next version of the app and accounts would be.
How do you collate data as to whether what you do actually has an effect. Surveys? I ask because if it is the latter and you got direct feedback that said the reason x percentage of plus cancellations was as a result of this move///x percent of users buy plus because of the open banking integration then it would take a lot of what is otherwise a fair guess away?
Thanks for this. So interesting!
One thing to test if I might:
I don’t quite follow the argumentation that these need to be paid features. Are you saying that because the features are paid they have additional value in users’ eyes? Or are you using it as a shortcut for these features, which happen to be in the paid tier?
Basically, wouldn’t the same argument apply if the Plus/Premium feature set were totally free?
Apologies, I wasn’t clear - I meant this is how the features that are currently available to Paid users only could generate revenue if they were made available to everyone.
I’d rather not go into specifics here, so unfortunately I’ll revert to the boring but safe ‘we’re always looking at how the external market is developing’ and ‘we’re always assessing which features should sit behind the paywall’ - sorry!
Again, I won’t go into specifics on how we conduct data analysis, but there are many ways to gauge the impact of our actions - surveys is one; another would be to observe how user behaviour changes after we make a change in the app; and many other more sophisticated analyses!
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