What are we working on? The Monzo Weekly Diary

I would love to see a live (or almost live) dashboard with anonomised data about what weā€™re spending money on. Would be fascinating to see.

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+1 on that idea!
Also where we are spending money - if it can be suitably anonymisedā€¦

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The newly released targets feature should be quite prominent too. Itā€™ll be highlighting the fact that Monzo is interested in helping users look after ther finances, not just hold their money and make a profit off of them.

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Afternoon all!

Iā€™m James and I work on the Monzo iOS app :iphone:

As you may know, weā€™ve been granted our banking licence and entered mobilisation. As a result, my focus has switched from day-to-day feature development to focusing on features that need to be ready in order to exit mobilisation, such as making payments to other banks.

This ties in with the work that @matt and others are doing now on the backend (previous post in this thread).

Right now Iā€™m working on overdrafts ā€“ how you learn about, apply for and use them, how having one interacts with your feed the pulse graph, and how we make sure itā€™s clear what it costs and how to manage it :chart_with_downwards_trend:

Next up, Iā€™d like to nominate our awesome new Android dev @emmag :thumbsup:

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Oh hello!!

I joined just over 3 weeks ago and have been straight into helping out the Android team :slight_smile:

Since shipping :ship: Android 1.0, Iā€™ve been busy doing some bug fixing as well as looking in to our automated tests, which of late have been a bit unreliable - super annoyingly!

Next up: @hugo!

Thanks @emmag :wave:

As always, please do yourself a favour and start following me on Twitter. If you are already following me that only means that youā€™re an excellent human beingā€¦ congratulations!

A few things on my plate right now:

  1. Golden tickets yo.

  2. Today weā€™ve interviewed 9 lovely users to try to learn more about how they manage their contacts on different social networks. The reason for that is that weā€™re working on a new P2P flow and we want to make it perfect :slight_smile:

  3. We have this internal list that we call ā€œBadass ideasā€ with all the great ideas that we may like to build at some point. So Iā€™ve decided to own that list and try to push some of them with @ole and @tristan into our roadmap :map:

  4. Iā€™m working with @zancler on a cost sharing functionality. Weā€™re trying to not call it ā€œbill splittingā€ but you get the idea. Itā€™s going to be incredible.

I think thatā€™s all, next up my friend @paul aka ā€œthe guy with the strongest ping pong backhand in townā€ :ping_pong:

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Hey @hugo - I remember seeing the ā€˜Baddass ideasā€™ list on the wall when I went to visit Monzo HQ many months back - are you planning on sharing them more publicly somehow (Im not sure if they are on the backlog on the transparent roadmap)

@JamesBell maybe thatā€™s a good idea at some point. To be completely honest that list has been a bit neglected during the last few months so weā€™re trying to clean it up and encourage the whole company to use it often. So, yeah, maybe in a few months time itā€™s something that we can integrate in the transparent roadmap :slight_smile:

@hugo - cool, I really liked that list - I think its important to get ā€˜wowā€™ features in to highlight whats possible with a new bank that the old ones cant do - freeze card is my go-to one when showing Monzo to people for the first time (solves a real pain point, great example of something the existing banks are rubbish at, most people have encountered this pain before). I guess its hard to get them in the roadmap when you still have things like direct debit, faster payments, overdraft to work on though!

Well, that must have been a :muscle::ping_pong:serve by @hugo as itā€™s taken me a week to hit back :blush: so first up itā€™s a big sorrrrrryyyyy everyone. I actually took last week off and decided to go into :e-mail: and Slack blackout mode and so totally missed my turn for the posting :disappointed:. There are two things I have learnt from this, firstly that I need a better way of managing my ā€˜to doā€™ list (suggestions welcome :slight_smile:) . Secondly, that although the Monzo culture is all about working smart and hard, we also let and encourage everyone in the company to have ā€˜down timeā€™ to recharge their :battery::battery:. This is also something I havenā€™t been very good at!

So, with my apology and holiday over, Iā€™d love to share whatā€™s on my plate these days. Top of my ā€˜to doā€™ list is getting the restrictions lifted from our banking licence :bank: :scroll:. Athough we are a bank, we are restricted to taking no more than Ā£50,000 of deposits (in total across all customers - although excluding the pre-paid card balances) and we canā€™t lend - both fairly fundamental restrictions! As you may recall, Monzo Bank is currently in the mobilisation phase as we finish building out our systems, recruit (more) staff, get the bank account working, do another round of fund raising :moneybag: and generally get the bank ready to be fully operational. We have every part of the company engaged in mobilisation in one way or another and this diary is a great way for you to get a flavour of all the things that are underway. Of the many things we have to sort out, two have been receiving my attention in recent days: hiring and lending. On hiring after many and extensive interviews weā€™ve made a number of appointments so I wonā€™t steal their thunder and will let them introduce themselves in the coming days and weeks. On lending, my blog post certainly stirred up some interest! Thank you to everyone who took the trouble to email and message me with your suggestions and opinions. Eventually, I managed to respond to everyone and I can say for sure this was worth doing as I learnt a lot. I promise we will share more on our lending plans as they continue to take shape.

Next up itā€™s the man who many of you will only here from when the :crescent_moon: is out and you need help with your :monzo: :iphone: :credit_card: itā€™sā€¦ @dillonvanauken :boom: :us:

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Pulling this out and quoting it because itā€™s super important. Huge shoutouts to everyone at Monzo for having this healthy attitude. Iā€™ve had too many friends in unhealthy startups and met too many people in my temporary work who get completely burned out within the year from never having genuine downtime.

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Sorry @paul, looks like Iā€™m running a bit late here :alarm_clock:

Hello everyone! I work for Monzoā€™s Ops team and spend most of my time working remotely from Los Angeles :palm_tree: :palm_tree: so that I can provide evening customer support for our customer base back in the UK :crescent_moon: :uk:

My main focus has been handling customer support queries recently, and it is really exciting to see so many new customers writing in as the number of Monzo users continues to grow :chart_with_upwards_trend: Things have been getting quite busy but our team will be expanding soon so that we can continue to respond as quickly and thoroughly as possible to any issues you may be having :boom: :iphone: :credit_card:

In addition to handling queries, Iā€™ve been working through some merchant enrichment tasks with the help of @natashaā€™s excellent training alongside the rest of the Ops Team :monzo:
Iā€™ve also recently begun helping the wider team look into international regulatory requirements as part of our mobilisation phase so that we can be able to accept customers from around the world :earth_africa: Iā€™m really looking forward to being able to introduce all my friends over here :us: to the best bank on the planet one day :rocket:

While working remotely can occasionally feel lonely, with the magicā€‹:sparkles: of Google hangouts and Slack I feel connected as ever to the wider team and am really looking forward to being back in the London office next month for a couple of weeks :airplane:ļø

Thatā€™s all for me now, next up is @Naji !

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Hey all, hope everyoneā€™s having a good weekend. Iā€™m Community Manager here at Monzo.

There are a few things on my plate at the momentā€¦:plate_with_cutlery:

Old Street has been home to Monzo HQ since we started in early 2015 so itā€™s no surprise we have such an active user base in the area. Weā€™ve got a lot of :heart:ļø for the individuals and independent vendors who make the neighbourhood such a unique destination and in celebration of this, Iā€™m working on an exciting Monzo community led Old Street/Shoreditch takeover campaign. Keep ā€˜em peeled for details! :eyes:

Iā€™m sure many of you will have joined or viewed discussions on moderation and housekeeping on the community page. Weā€™re overwhelmingly proud and grateful to all the users who have made the forum such a great platform for reference and discussion. As the community grows Itā€™s super important we empower and support you to continue this. Working out how best to do so is what Iā€™m currently researching/working on and Iā€™ll be reaching out in coming weeks for your help and feedback to find a plan to suits all :slightly_smiling_face:

Next up, I nominate @stompydan :raised_hands:

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Canā€™t wait to see what youā€™ve got planned for the takeover campaign. Hopefully weā€™ll see plenty of photos here.

Hello! Iā€™m the newest back-end engineer here at Monzo at the moment :slight_smile:

So far Iā€™ve mainly been working on things to help internal goings-on: firstly a way for us to record some basic information about how youā€™re using the Monzo app (type of device, app version, things like that) so that customer support can help you out even more efficiently.

Also Iā€™ve been building a better way for us to keep an eye on official lists of potentially problematic people. Thereā€™s some people we simply canā€™t service, and some that we need to consider before allowing them a card. This is only a very small set of people in the scheme of things, but important to keep on top of. Thisā€™ll mean weā€™re exposed to less risk, and have more time and resources to help the vast majority of upstanding folk :+1:

Iā€™m going to nominate @tristan cos it looks like itā€™s been a while :slight_smile:

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:smile: :wave: :wave: :wave:

Is that like those people with poor credit history, or other things?

How transparent will this be to applicants?

Clin

Because itā€™s based upon official lists then I would assume this about sanctions checking. Itā€™s illegal to offer financial services to known terrorists, etc. That kind of thing.

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Thanks Ben. That makes more sense than my guess (particularly since people with a poor credit history can still be ā€œupstanding folkā€).

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Monzo currently doesnā€™t offer a credit solution / loans so they donā€™t do a credit check when you sign up.

That will obviously change once Monzo starts offering overdrafts but youā€™ll be told in advance, before a credit check is made.

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