Curious that I never ever had an ISA before the one I have open in my Monzo app
Yes, I know it’s with another company, but you can find quotes above lambasting Monzo for not being sufficiently hub-like
Let’s break those down:
- Mortgages
- Credit Cards
Historically Monzo stated that they didn’t want to be a “Balance sheet heavy” bank - they wanted these services to be provided by specialist providers and to instead be the aggregator - the “Financial Control Centre” (the actual original de-facto mission-statement).
- ISAs
They do offer ISAs.
- Insurance
That’s a relic from legacy banks. Why is it mandatory that your bank be your insurance provider?
And it should be noted that you can display your external ISAs and credit cards in your account (via Plus), which is just great.
come on, they’re not a charity. You don’t do anything for them they’re under no obligation to give you anything for free. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
I use Monzo for everything - from business to personal to joint. It’s absolutely not a glorified cash card, unless you’re using it like that by mistake.
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Spot on, I personally would like to see Monzo diversify it’s product offering to closer to the full range offered at traditional banks. This will allow for more revenue generation and, hopefully, profitability overall from these activities. You are absolutely right that it’s difficult to make a current account alone a profitable proposition - and I think they will be on to a loser if they do try to do this.
Growing the product range will also attract more customers which you can sell a current account to. At a certain scale, I believe that the current account will then, itself, become cash-positive for Monzo as they won’t have the overheads of traditional banks. So this is absolutely the way to go!
I recognise the need for cuts now is likely largely due to the lack of travel as, at this early stage in it’s life, Monzo’s revenue is primarily the interchange it receives from card transactions and this is significantly higher outside the EEA - so with lack of travel, comes lack of income for Monzo. Hopefully, Monzo can weather the storm and get back to a good financial position once the worst of coronavirus is over.
Edit:
This isn’t to mean that the “hub model” can’t work as well, but it would be good for Monzo to offer their own products alongside their partner banks. This would allow for even greater choice and customers could chose what suits them best, but a significant number would be likely to use Monzo’s products which would help with profitability.
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How is profit a dirty word?
Ignoring the fact you’re wrong with your list, what’s the obsession with a bank offering it all?
I don’t care about Monzo offering a mortgage or a credit card. I will shop around for the best deal.
7 posts were merged into an existing topic: Removed Posts - September 2020
Thanks @jackcully - lots of details and opinions to carefully navigate through here.
But what did you have for dinner? 
And was it good?
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Wow!
Been away for a few days no Wi-fi and come back to read all this.
I must admit I am mainly cash free - although this has been more in last 12 months.
Most places I use, take card however there are a number only take cash
Taxi’s - no Uber here!
90% of takeaways
A few local shops
My fave holiday destination is 
- missed it this year.
They charge €3 for ATM withdrawals - doesn’t feel as bad now in comparison?
We appear to have drifted off the course of fee discussions so some posts will shortly disappear.
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If Monzo did them they’d probably have the one of the best UX out of their competitors and everything you’d expect from a modern, digital financial product in 2020.
Well said @danmullen!
Back to the topic at hand: I think that app-only banking can be an incredible thing for promoting financial inclusivity; rural or remote people don’t have to travel to access banking services, ditto the disabled or elderly who may be unable to drive and reply on buses to get to their nearest town which has banks.
Branch closures have made life more difficult for customers of traditional banks, as their business processes sometimes force you to “pop in to the branch” to get something sorted.
All of this is a hassle that Monzo customers can avoid.
However, I believe that the approach should be to help customers to self-service themselves remotely as much as possible. Arguably, in terms of some features, this ought to mean allowing things like ATM withdrawals (because they are the replacement for branch withdrawals) up to a generous limit. The goal for users is to have a life as digital as possible, clearly, but sometimes in the real world a digital version isn’t possible so Monzo needs to provide some “old-style” services too.
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and most if not all users can remove the fees if they use the account as a “main account” or speak to Customer ops about their situation 
I really dont get the outrage about fees that you have a choice whether you pay them or not
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Absolutely, but since a main account is difficult to define it has to result in some criteria to qualify.
The issue with this is that people can struggle to meet the criteria, in some edge cases, even if the account is their main one. It’s not nice to have to proactively seek support so I’d like Monzo to expand the list of things they automatically identify.
Also, I think there is a problem in terms of customer attractiveness - many people who use Monzo primarily now started by ‘dipping their toes in the water’ and then ramped up their usage as they started to feel more comfortable. I think this approach helped Monzo’s growth previously. In the future, these changes will make it more difficult to do that and may risk putting people off before they’ve tried the account.
If people struggle to meet the criteria Monzo have already said they will look at your circumstances regarding growth and this putting customers off - maybe, maybe not , the same was said of changing from a pre paid card to a CA , the same was said about foreign ATM fees and the customer base grew from 200,000 prepaid cards to 4,5m current accounts in those circumstances
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Agreed. Which (risking off-topic) is why the lack of cheque imaging is such a pain.
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I’ve reviewed my own ATM transactions- £2.4k in 3 years.
However £1.8k was for holiday spend, where cards were not taken.
Personally I don’t see these changes really affecting me.
If I did I might change bank.
I’m far happier to see where my money has gone - round up in a savings pot and use my own categories with Plus.
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I was going to bring this up too, but decided against it as I wanted to avoid going off-topic.
But I will just say that this exemplifies my feeling on how Monzo should deal with necessary analogue experiences if it is to appeal to a mass market. Deal with them in a way which is simple for the customer, allows them to keep their experience as digital as possible, and doesn’t compromise the experience vis-à-vis a traditional bank (i.e. it works at least as well, although preferably better, than a traditional bank).
Like allowing cash withdrawals at an ATM, but letting you put a note on it to track what the cash was for - the next best thing to a fully detailed transaction page from using your card (and great if you have to use cash for something). The “normal” kind of ATM allowance previously was fine for this but the new allowance for customers not meeting the conditions is very small.
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Because you’re on plus you’re exempt from the atm% in the EEA AND UK anyway so you’re all good
Thank you for making me aware of the contents of my email.
I’m fully aware of what plus means now. I was using my cash from ATMs of £600 over 3 years to demonstrate my previous post that I rely on cash less.
Apologies if you missed this I can see it’s been a very busy topic.
You can already add a note on it