Personally I would not. I feel like the default should be flat, and for those with lots of pots or who prefer to group them that’d be fine if required (I don’t have a need for it that I can think of, but clearly some people do). I think you might be forced to include such a feature if you did flatten, for those with lots of pots, but that’d be fine, I just don’t see why it is the default.
What confuses me about pots is that they’ve had several concepts squeezed into them - external credit cards, external savings accounts, and internal accounts without an exposed account number, and all of those things are attached to a current account. Then we also have separate joint accounts which don’t fit in this scheme and can have their own pots! I feel like the abstraction is bursting at the seams, and is only going to get more and more difficult as you add more types of account. For a user coming from another bank and seeing this I’d be confused as to why some pots were under monzo and some not and what are pots anyway when they can be so many different things.
Objections to flattening/doing away with the hierarchy are partly tied in with the current system and how people have learned to use it - they are allowed 10 pots attached to each account, so some have probably hit that limit and learned to love having this sort of sub-account, and thus react with horror to the idea of levelling that hierarchy. So maybe you’d need a solution for them, I’m just really unsure for the majority of people if it is useful or that it should be the default.
One possible solution for those with lots of accounts would be a menu to show a vertical list (like your posts lists just now), to jump quickly to a certain account. I would include joint accounts in that menu though.
For example I have:
- Monzo current
- Credit Card (external)
- ISA Savings Pot (external)
I’d maybe add a few more accounts in time, maybe I’d add a business, joint account and want visibility into kids accounts - I see all those as accounts, not sub-accounts, and would like to be able to share any of the accounts with other users e.g. share accounts with wife, children, business partners or friends.
You’ll know the figures of course, it’d be interesting to know how many people have > 5 accounts say in their monzo app, I suspect it’s below a few % of users who use it this way.
Thank you for the updates on this post, the great designs, and for attempting to reconcile the conflicting demands of so many forum users. I hope some of it the feedback is useful and it really is fascinating for customers to see your thinking behind these decisions where you have to balance an awful lot of competing demands.
