People who use the locked pot system as a psychological thing, won’t perhaps be affected (like yourself).
But those who use it as a genuine barrier to impulse spending will be massively affected.
Imagine Monzo all of a sudden saying that you could simply turn off the gambling block in app?
It’s the same thing for the people who suffer from impulse control.
Agree that it’s better to start with minimal friction and work up though - It’s just unfortunate that Monzo started with maximum friction and have stripped it right back.
Oh no I 100% agree - I said earlier in the thread I feel the “friction pendulum” has swung the complete other way and isn’t really conducive as a “lock” imo - but for me my “psychological” thing remains intact.
I agree - I think these two scenarios provide fine margins between operating as a business and operating in the space of genuinely wanting to help its customers and put forward an ethos.
This is it, I think if we had started from this perspective and not the very hard barrier it would be a different conversation.
So if you have locked a pot and have a £0 balance user can unlock pot. Example - As a pot unlocked and funds transferred to main account I have then gone back in to lock the pot and changed the original date to a day later but have now realised the scheduled payment out is now a day earlier.
If cash in a locked pot then they you have a “gambling” block so user waits 24hrs minimum
I agree with you. I think we got this one wrong on the first iteration and we should have never built this feature around contacting customer support. We’re learning from it though and try and ensure we don’t make the same mistake again.
The next question I suppose is when are we to expect the second iteration of this I assume would assume sooner rather than later(As I hope you would have already been iterating on it when you first realised there was a problem)
As soon as we roll out, get data and learn from this new update we’ll be able to answer to that.
Here we’re talking about different hypothesis but there’s a scenario in which this level of friction is enough (the same way that macOS doesn’t let you add more friction over what a locked file or folder means) so for now the priority is to see how much value do users see on the “soft” lock, and take it from there.
I have to say Im not a fan of this. The idea behind locking a pot is that you cant get access. Forcing the pot to close is a good measure to try encourage savers to keep the pot locked. This locked pot idea would probably work better on some sort of interest bearing feature where unlocking has some sort of interest loss penalty.
One of the reasons I’ll never run my own bank is because I’d use a ‘locked means locked’ approach (to borrow a phrase) but I don’t imagine that would wear well with customers and maybe even regulators when I wouldn’t let people have their money back until the pot unlocked.
I think it’s more to do with the cost to ‘run’ this feature than any complaints.
“Ohh we’ve created something very successful that took off and now we are struggling to give our customers a good service with it so we need to look at changing it…” seems to be more of how we got here?
Anyway, add in the 24hr delay as a friction point and I think this still ‘works’ for the majority of use cases (80/20 and all that)?
Exactly, it’s not about complaints. It’s about a large proportion of people deciding they need to unlock their pots before the established date (because they really need access to the money) and having to talk with customer support to get it done, which takes time regardless of how quickly our COps are.
As a general rule this is not a successful approach if we need human interaction in one out of five locked pots. That’s why we need to start again, and learn.
Yeah, that’s one the candidates. There are a few ideas along those lines.
Maybe there can be an opt-in like the gambling block where you can have the option of really locking yourself in if you have problems with impulse buying or saving money in general.
Prsonally I would rather know that I can’t get to the money. I need to learn to have discipline with my money. Any half-hearted attempt will just allow me to factor in that I can have that money if I need it, instead of being more disciplined.
It’s a hard one because I don’t think you can please everyone, but if you lock something you shouldn’t just be able to unlock it.
With this in mind the next iteration should be not be COp orientated what does that mean:
This means either a PIN idea or some sort of time lock and then rename the “locked” Pots to “Hands off”(I would prefer Terramundi but I assume they’ve copyrighted the name)
(https://www.terramundi.co.uk/?gclid=Cj0KCQiAwc7jBRD8ARIsAKSUBHJYzQWVFA3drE73dX9X0Ayg_zAe6fKkAEcIYocyac9eC8e8sYuglkAaAvbZEALw_wcB)
and provide an explanation as to what their purpose is. It should be sign posted as to what it should be used for when you’re tempted but you’re saving up for something big or if you have issues with spending(then run a PR campaign about different types of spending and encourage #spendingBMI)
Or, allow people to unlock with some additional friction that isn’t COP oriented? Like a 24hr delay?
I get the thinking, that ‘people’ can’t be trusted to use things the way they ‘should be’ but such is reality. With the best intentions in the world, people aren’t great at managing money. Pots are a good foundation for getting a level of control, and sure some people will just unlock them willy-nilly (technical term there!) but a lot more will find this change useful, given the data we’ve been presented at least.
This way needs no med/big additional cost or PR effort (also expensive).
I understand what you’re saying but we also need to cater for emergencies and mistakes. For example, you have a locked pot and you add some money to it that you were trying to move somewhere else. Now you have a problem.
Of course all these different cases have different possible solutions that we can eventually get to but we’re also trying to come up with something simple enough that everybody can understand.
That’s not what I mean. What I mean is that with the new lock mechanism we’ll be able to see if the ratio of manual unlock differs (and how much) from the old model. Do you know what I mean?
There’s a chance in which the customer support interaction was adding zero friction and literally everybody who wanted to unlock a pot were actually unlocking it.
There’s another scenario in which 100% of people will unlock their pots earlier just because it’s now easier and won’t be able to stick to their goals.
The reality will be somewhere in between. That’s what I mean by data and learning, if that makes sense.
