The reason that Pulse and Summary are a bad fit now is actually deeply related. Do you remember when Monzo started out it was really, really good at showing you where your discretionary spending was going? When Monzo became a full bank and people put all their bills and other expenses in there they lost that clean, crisp edge. Pulse showed you how fast you were spending your discretionary money. Summary broke down your discretionary spending into categories. They were two halves of the same whole - giving you insight into your past spending in order to help you to decrease your future spending (Summary), and also see in real-time when things were a bit off-the-rails (Pulse), so that you could correct your short-term behaviour in order to achieve your long-term goals.
But now, what do we see?
Pulse is esentially useless because you can’t get any feel for your discretionary spending anymore. Your fixed (mandatory) spending (rent and bills) will go out no matter what you do. Further, we all have to eat, so your groceries are pretty much a fixed cost, too. And those things dominate spending. So now your discretionary spending is mostly a statistical error, subsumed by the noise of your mandatory spending, and the pulse graph is, yes, totally useless. But it wouldn’t be if you showed it to people in relation to their discretionary spending only.
Summary is more useful than pulse, but it’s hamstrung in the same way. It in no way allows people to see their discretionary and mandatory spending separately. While one might argue that all spending is, in a way, discretionary as you can move to a property with cheaper rent (if you rent), etc, it’s a damn sight easier to cancel that Netflix subscription or to not buy three coffees from Starbucks every day. When the app only contained people’s discretionary spending this wasn’t a problem, but now that people have mandatory spending in there the lack of distinction between the two is a critical problem for your app. I honestly think that a large part of the tension around (so, so many) people asking for additional categories in the app is actually rooted in this - on both sides. Monzo want to still have your various bills spending categorised so that they can cross-sell you cheaper services from other providers (this is in fact the stated business model now), and people are frustrated that the current set don’t let them see where they could save money. Having a cross-cutting categorisation of “Mandatory” vs “Discretionary” would allow people to better understand where they could save. You need to help people to split up the space of their outgoings with respect to saving money that is wasted so that they can achieve their long-term financial goals. It’s not possible to stop paying rent. It’s not possible to stop paying for the tube to go to work. It’s not possible to not pay for water to your house. It’s not possible to not pay your council tax. So why on earth are these things muddled in with things that you mostly have no choice over (groceries) and things that you have discretion over - like Starbucks and Netflix?
There’s a larger point to be made here, though. It’s that Monzo is currently far, far, FAR too tied to the line-item view of the account, and not nearly tied enough to the higher-level overview. You see, while it’s nice to think that irregular payments, irregular income, etc. are not the norm, that’s not actually the case. Let me give you just one dumb example; my washing machine broke and my landlord sent me money to have it replaced, which I duly did. This caused two line-items in my account - a transfer from my landlord, and a payment for the washing machine. While I can exclude the latter from spending, I cannot exclude the former from income. But worse, I cannot mark these items as paired and excluded together. Expenses payments look a lot like this, too. And how about things like a ZipCar subscription, which has both irregular payments and a yearly subscription fee? The line-item level (or its close approximation in the current version of your app - line items divided into months and divided into awkward categories) doesn’t help people get an overview of their financial position now and in the future.
What I truly believe you need to do is move more in the direction of accounting software. It’s not enough to just cross-sell people an ISA, some insurance, and a new mortgage deal and then claim that you’ve solved their financial problems and made money work for them. You need to give people a dashboard from which they can understand where their money is going, extract what their financial goals are from them, and then provide tools to integrate the two together. Help people to actually get in control of their finances at a level above the minutia of their day-to-day outgoings. Give them a financial control centre. Help get their money to really work for them.