UK Roadmap

You’re all so cynical :joy:

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What a ridiculous comment. What’s the standard of annual reports like at the other companies you’ve crowdfunded? I bet they do the bare minimum.

Monzo do fully fledged investor festivals for Christ sake!

Yet people complain if they don’t get a quarterly email (which typically says very little anyway).

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Did. Past tense. There may well be more in the future but I’ve certainly seen nothing to suggest it will happen again.

Let me just jump in with a few reasons a roadmap might not be common anymore for the company (this is my opinion, nothing official)

  • Flexibility and setting expectations - if we tell you we will deliver Credit Cards in late 2021, you will be hyped, which is great, but we lose the flexibility of changing that plan without upsetting people. If something else comes up which would generate more revenue, chances are - our priorities would shift. That is the exact reason I regret setting expectations for our IFTTT changes in another thread in the community. Due to COVID those plans changed massively and we couldn’t deliver on IFTTT at all.

  • The customer base is not as small and engaged as it used to be - when Monzo had 500,000 customers and the community was thriving, people were genuinely interested on a roadmap and they represented a large portion of the customer base. As we grow and become a bit more mainstream, in reality most customers just want a bank that makes their life easier. Very few know all the features and even fewer look forward to new ones

  • Some of the new features generate revenue but aren’t interesting to customers - I’ve spent 1y6m working on SCA. This will massively reduce our fraud and save us money. Additionally we have exciting improvements to our lending (or as we call internally, Borrowing). People don’t care about this. So only showing the “exciting stuff” makes it seem like Monzo isn’t doing enough. And then people complain about the lack of new features

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On the last point is something that touches me a bit. It’s easy for people to say “there haven’t been new features in while”.

I work in payments. For 2 years I’ve been making our card payments more reliable & secure, reducing fraud, improving merchant acceptance, not to mention all of the paperwork we need to do as a regulated bank.

The same applies to a majority of the company really. There are lots of things happening, but a small portion makes it to the eyes of the end customer

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They really can’t win.

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I personally would love to know about all the back end improvements that are happening. Surfacing more of that information would be super interesting. Back end improvements are features in themselves.

You guys are doing great work.

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I’d be interested to see if this gets picked up in the future, given that the vast majority of people who put those events together are no longer with the company.

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Who can’t win? I was just pointing out the inaccuracy in what you said, I clearly said they may well do in the future, but as @simonb has already pointed out, those people who went to a lot of time and effort to do those events are no longer at Monzo, and the company of then, to me at least, feels a very different beast to the one of today, so I’m not sure what you were getting at there? Feels like you read more into it than was there…

I don’t believe it’s a ridiculous comment.

Let me decouple two things. Firstly any public roadmap is very different to shareholder updates. Apologies if I’ve unnecessarily conflated them.

While customer engagement and public roadmaps are very much down to management choice, I think that shareholders should be treated a bit differently. But that’s the rub: lots of companies (Monzo included) have very broad crowdfund bases that they treat less as investors and more as an engaged customer base.

In my experience, other companies tend to write out quarterly with a brief management overview and an indication on finances. During lockdown I’ve had quite a few Zoom meeting invites to update shareholders on what’s going on.

On the Monzo front, there has previously been some interesting stuff (like the Investival) but those were generally engagement pieces. As a shareholder, I want to know about route to profitability, numbers, business plan etc. I might be being unfair, but I don’t really remember any of that being discussed, or hearing about it by email.

So let me say again, with apologies for the conflation, that a shareholder update (usually from the CEO) is a standard courtesy. That doesn’t have to be the same as a product update. But crowdfunding as a customer engagement exercise has largely confused those two things, I think.

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But Monzo are supposed to be so transparent.

It wasn’t that long ago that Monzo and others here would mock other traditional banks and financial services for not telling us every time someone blows their nose. Slow dinosaur would get banded around a lot IIRC

Sorry but you can’t have it both ways.

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Plans and businesses evolve, couldn’t care less that there’s no road map, and the majority of Monzo’s users won’t either.

This is only amplified on the forum by a small % of people who think differently.

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I agree.

I’m only disagreeing with the Monzo staff defence

And for the free tier 1 support offered here. If we all ignored all the asks for help I bet the community would be gone shortly afterwards

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The backend stuff isn’t to be scoffed at. Running infrastructure that’s more efficient and more reliable than the competition is pretty much the holy grail. Better technology can give monzo commercial advantage in all sorts of areas.

Back to the original topic, the other reason you won’t see a monzo roadmap again is that features like “international payments,” “paying in cash reliably,” and “cheque imaging” would merely highlight inadequacies in the current offering.

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I think I agree with everything you’ve said except for this.

I think there’s a big appetite to know the boring, behind the scenes stuff. The intricacies of the card networks and patterns and back end systems are interesting to lots of folks on here.

But maybe that’s the ‘this forum vs the wider customer base’ point - it might be of interest to a handful of people on here, but would it drive enough engagement in terms of time and people cost to talk a bit more about it?

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I agree, and on that specific subject I always found @Rika ’s posts great.

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Agreed. I’ve learnt a lot (in the grand schemes a tiny amount) about how payments work from posts on here.

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Probably from you and I maybe Peter :smiley:

I’ve watched and the YouTube videos and learnt a bit of Golang and all, but not sure that’s particularly representative even of the few people I know in the flesh that have Monzo accounts (and they’re in the same field as me)

I’d love loads of down in the weeds stuff, but probably in the small minority now

I always love to hear from @arthur-ceccotti and I hope he’s not put off

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