So great to hear the news Monzo will be arriving in the US - I missed using my UK monzo card when I moved over here.
One feature request which would suit the antiquated banking system here would be to add the amount of tip you’ve left at a restaurant/ bar directly into the instant notification as SO many purchases require leaving written paper tips on physical receipts.
If you could force-touch the instant notification and add in the extra dollars you’ve written on the physical receipt, it would help with budgeting so much as it can be taken into your monzo account activity immediately rather than when processed by the business a few days later.
Equally it would help identify discrepancies if the business runs through a greater tip than what you actually wrote - the Monzo app could then flag the discrepancy between what you actually left on the paper receipt, and what they charged you (could also add in photo feature for the receipts to manage evidence).
That would save me so much hassle and enhance budgeting in the US which is tough when so much money has already been spent but just floating around on paper days after you made a purchase
Ideally there would be a solution for the tipping situation with Monzo in the US. The fact that it takes a couple of days for the amount to correct itself isn’t ideal.
Other feature request: do all the above (categorize transactions, notifications, tip-related improvements, etc) from credit card transactions!
As much as I love Monzo, I would realistically use a credit card for daily expenses, and pay it off from my Monzo account. It’s nice that showing credit card balance is coming, but I would really like to be able to see all the details about it from within Monzo
(hard part: getting the credit card providers to push real time data through their APIs…)
I’d love an easy transfer of money (at a reasonable exchange rate) from US to UK Monzo accounts and back. Now that the use of a debit card to add funds to an account has gone away and I’m back in the US this has made my UK Monzo current account much more difficult to top up from abroad. Thanks and welcome to the US!
Features I would like most from a US version of Monzo:
Accurately tracking my spending, including linking my Amex and the forthcoming Apple credit card. I’ve tried most of the spending tracker apps and they all routinely fail to categorise transactions correctly. The spending tracker is the feature I miss most about using Monzo in the UK.
+1 for easy $/£ transfers
Longer term if Monzo could provide credit-card like features (purchase protection, airline rewards or cashback, lounge access, travel insurance, nice metal card etc), I’d probably ditch the credit cards and just use Monzo for all of my spending.
I’m not sure if this is already a feature (and/or possible) but being able to easily track subscriptions would be amazing. Even better - having a way to “confirm” re-occuring transactions before they process would be dreamy
Out of curiosity, which of the US fintech apps have you tried? Do they not do spending tracking at all, or do they just not do it as well as Monzo? I was reading the comments under the two recent Verge articles and noticed a lot of people saying the US already has a lot of apps which already does what Monzo does, but its not clear which specific features they are referring to.
I tried two aggregators (Mint and Personal Capital), and the built in trackers from HSBC and American Express. They all offer tracking, but as you put it they just do not do it as well as Monzo. The main problem was that they get the categories wrong, and compound this with crappy UI for fixing them. Mint had a bunch of other bugs, for example I added a Paypal account and it started double-counting transactions.
One app I’ve had a good experience with is privacy.com - it lets you create virtual cards for subscriptions, meaning each subscription has a different card and you can cancel subscriptions by just cancelling the relevant card. Some banks offer this feature as well.
Student fees and loans are much more significant in the US than they are over here. I know we think dropping 9K a year on fees is outrageous but New York Uni is >$50K per year. Anything that could assist in managing those fees would be great. And I’m reminded that Facebook got massive from focusing on university students first who then went home and told their mates… e.g.
1: Easy for rich relatives to drop some money in their student loan accounts via pots or monzo.me links
2: Integration with Sofi (? - is that the right one?)
3: Take your student debt and refinance with additional credit data (let’s face it you’ve got a degree in AI from Harvard, we know you’re going to be good for the loan so offer a good rate and take on that debt within the app).
4: Few people pay full fees, how about a shared pot among all users where debt can be forgiven (I know that seems unlikely but forgiving debt is a thing in the US).
5: A fund for students from poor backgrounds to benefit from loans being written off.
Simple does this, and it is a nice feature. Some merchants, though, will do the card authorization after the tip has been entered, so ideally there would be some logic to keep track of which merchants typically settle the transaction for a higher % than the initial authorization, and only show the tip recommendation for those.
One other interesting feature would be to show a “typical” tip, by merchant. E.g. by comparing the card authorization and settlement averages, Monzo could say “an average Monzo customer leaves a 18% tip at Restaurant X, which would be $7.25”. That would be next-level.
Online - Branchless banking is nothing new to the USA. Though the US may behind in other ways such as chip & pin, contactless, and ease of digital transactions.
Whilst Monzo is targeting trendy young urbanites in the UK, if they truly want to make an impact in the US, they need to go after a whole other market; The under and unbanked. This is a large market in the US for various reasons, This has some pretty large negative impacts on this market.
Due to the lack of modern digital transaction infrastructure, currently checks are still the main way many people are paid. Not just plumbers, electricians, maids, etc. without a steady employer electronic salary payments are not mandated either, and many even those with bank accounts choose to be paid by check. This means the only way the unbanked can access their cash are by utilising check chasing services. These are services which will cash checks for you at a hefty fee. Upwards of 10%.
There is no faster payments system either so third party tools such as Apple Pay, Cash App (Square), Venmo, Paypal, etc. are a must for instant payments. Everyone must be on the same platform to transact. Many banks, though not all charge fees to make digital ACH / EFT payments. These can take days to clear.
So if Monzo really wants to make an impact it will be to get the 9 million or so unbanked and 24 million or so underbanked persons in the US banked. Free checking accounts are nothing new, not all require minimum balances, so this is about making banking easy, accessible, and understandable.
Great to know it would be useful.
