In my experience other banks donāt do a very good job of aggregation and analytics.
As long as Monzo provide a superior aggregation/analysis experience to what other banks provide for free (which I think they do), I donāt see a problem with them charging for it.
Trends is built from monzo back pocket, the product is built, hence they wonāt charge for it now.
Open banking canāt be displayed / handled differently to Monzo account information so why charge for one and not the other? They fall hand in hand, fully helping customers manage their finances and āmakes money work for everyoneā which is what monzo strives for.
Remove the blocks to a half hearted positioning and follow up on their goal on being the best at what they do, even at a small cost.
Had a look at it, itās just useless to me, doesnāt tell me anything which I donāt already know. Thereās nothing insightful one bit that has opened my eyes to what Iām spending.
I donāt have the need to constantly check up on what Iāve been spending, when Iāve spent it, where Iāve spent it and what does it compare as to other months.
Does nothing to help with cost of living one bit, I doubt the average user whoās struggling already will find it that useful either. They already know whatās been spent and whatās left to spend.
Please look at becoming a B-Corp, Monzo. 
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That would be a nice thing
I really donāt 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, itās not that people will downgrade, just that thereās one less thing to list as a benefit to subscribe in the first place.
I have to admit I like it. Itās great to be able to see all your account data in one place although to be fair Iām 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 itās pretty good for my purposes.
Loving the open and healthy debate on this one. I have to say I think thereās 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? Iām not sure - but also what else could monzo really do?
As an addition to this, I would love to see considerations around waiving plus feeās, giving people trials etc to see if they could explore the rest of plus for a while without having a financial commitment to it.
Iām aware monzo has to make money somewhere, but for me Plus probably isnāt it. Thatās for another thread however. Looking forward to seeing what happens next with trends
Iād 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 Iāve used it, I suppose.
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 donāt really change (at least for me) all that much month to month.
Personally Iād 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 āYour phone bill will be xx more this monthā āIf you reduce your budget by xx youāll save yyā etc.
Iām 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 DDās and SOās and have a top line liquid cash figure. R-
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.
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, itās 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 donāt get, why need to change as it was very helpful to have separate Trends for separate currencies 
āthe Trends tab pulls from the current account primarily and not connected accountsā
It is now, looks like
It was no problem a few months ago on any of my connected accounts 
Hi everyone, Iām Aris, and I work in our Plus and Premium team. Thereās 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 isnāt in our favour! As Rore said, the main reason for making the graphs free is that we think itās 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 weāre 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.
Weāre 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, weād expect that to impact people signing up to Monzo in the first place (which hasnāt happened yet). Itās something weāre always assessing!
Itās true other banks offer open banking for free, but we genuinely believe our open banking is better than what youāll find elsewhere. What youāre paying for is not really open banking: itās 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 itās 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 weāre 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 weāre trying to answer 
And yes, the modelling and data analysis on this is fascinating!
Could this extend to thisā¦
Or do the sums not work here?
Great post. Thank you for sharing Monzoās thoughts here 
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. Itās an oversimplification, but Monzo needed to differentiate itself through software - and then charge for it - to survive.
But now weāre 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, Iād argue, would ultimately mean fewer pay walled features because you want to entice that cash in that youāre 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, Iām not expecting an answer to this. But Iād be super keen to understand if the argument resonates or whether Iāve missed the point.
Thatās true, and we are asking the same questions; the argument definitely resonates and you havenāt 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, itās not that weāre not having these discussions internally, we absolutely are; itās 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, thatās also something weāre asking ourselves, and I think itās an even harder question than the previous one! I donāt think that doing away with our subscription products is the only way to differentiate though.
