What are we working on? The Monzo Weekly Diary

I occasionally need to use my card as ID when picking up a parcel (at the Royal Mail sorting office, UPS point in the corner shop, etc.). Not having my name on the card when Mondo is a full bank would be inconvenient for these (admittedly infrequent) incidents if I wanted to switch to Mondo as my only/main account.

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Ruh roh, I’m a day late! Many apologies @zancler and thanks for nominating me :slight_smile:

I’m the CTO at Mondo, which means I spend all day doing random things while everyone else does actual work.

Yesterday was no exception! As far as I remember here’s what I did:

  • Phone screened applicants for the Android role :telephone_receiver:
  • Put together an interview plan for the first Android on-site interviews :date:
  • Cleared out a backlog of false positive fraud alerts from the long weekend :policeman:
  • Worked on the architecture of our new internal tools :question:

While I used to do a lot of coding every day up until the beginning of this year, I’ve intentionally stepped back from that so I can absorb all these interrupt driven tasks :open_umbrella:️:poop:

Next I nominate my co-founder @tom who just got back from a well deserved vacation! :parasol_on_ground:

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Thanks @jonas!

I’m the CEO at Mondo, which involves setting strategy/goals and then handing off all the real work to the rest of the team :wink:

Over the last year, I’ve been the face of the company for the media, customers and investors. In a typical day I might do a press interviews and maybe an event or conference in the evening. I’m generally on my feet a lot, delivering the Mondo elevator pitch several times a day. I might meet an investor for breakfast or lunch, updating them on our progress and talking about future goals.

I also tend to do a lot of 1:1 meetings with members of the team, and interview every final-round candidate before we offer them a job. If I’ve got some spare time, I’ll chip in and do some front-line customer support for an hour or two.

I really enjoy writing articles for our blog, but that’s slowed down recently. I’ll try to get back into it!

We’re in the final stages of the application for our banking licence, so that takes up a fair amount of time. I’ve got interviews with the Bank of England next week, so I’m spending a lot of time preparing with lawyers and advisors at the moment.

Tomorrow I nominate @mcampbell!

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Hello! :wave: I’m Maria, teambuilder / office manager here. I’m responsible for making sure we have a super strong team with the right people in the right roles; that our internal people-processes make sense and are useful; and that we all have everything we need in place so we can each focus on doing what we do best - building a bank :bank:

So what am I up to today?

It’s work-from-home Friday :sunny: so there are only a couple of us in the office today. WFH Fridays help us shape our internal processes to be inclusive even when people aren’t in the office, and they’re great for focussed work. They’re also one of the few days each month that we aren’t interviewing!

I’m in the office today to keep an eye on our builders :hammer: They’ve been painting, putting doors on our new meeting rooms and fixing our kitchen today. We’re all super excited about having an office that’s beautiful, comfortable and big enough for the whole team next week!

This morning I was setting up some HR software so we can track holidays smoothly (yay holidays :beach_umbrella: ). One of the growing pains you face with scaling a team well is that all your internal processes break - our holiday tracking spreadsheet has finally hit this point. We’ll also get a fancy internal team directory as a result of this, which is super useful for people who mostly work remote, and makes first days easier for people who are new to the team.

This afternoon I’m refining our jobs postings for both Customer Support and Community Manager. Whenever we hire someone new, I tweak ads for other people joining that team: it’s super important to us that we have diverse perspectives & strengths among us, so I reshape what we’re looking for, both in the interview process and in the ad, to ensure we’re building an amazing well-balanced company.

For Monday, I’m nominating @duncanb .

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Thanks Maria. I’m Duncan and I’ve worked for Mondo for nearly 3 months. My job is to help write the processes that we need to support customers. These processes help give staff information they may need to complete an activity or extra information they may want to share with customers to help them with different situations. The processes can be for things we need to do today but mostly they are items we will need when the current accounts are launched. Some of the processes are really positive, some not so great. Friday I was working on what we need to do if a customer dies and what we can do to support next of kin or an executor at what would obviously be a very difficult time. Bit glum… but we need to have a plan to support our customers whatever life (or death) throws at them.

Today I’m looking at outcome testing (which is a bit less depressing). We will use outcome testing to measure good or bad customer outcomes as part of our quality assurance at every part of the Mondo journey. This outcome driven approach focuses on treating customers as individuals and doing the right thing for that particular customer. It helps empower our team and build a culture where doing the right thing is our fundamental objecting, rather than being a Bank that just follows a process or ticks a box. We know every customer is different so we want to build a culture where we will do the right things for those individuals. We will use outcome testing to look at customer experience and review all elements of a particular engagement (for example the end to end experience for opening an account) to make sure everything we have done drives the right result.

I’m nominating @paul next as he’s all refreshed from a week off (although I think he did secretly do some work).

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Thanks @duncanb! And you’re right, I sent a couple of :mondo: emails when I was off last week although I’d better not say any more because my wife Debbie is part of the community!

I’m the Deputy Chief Executive and responsible (with LOADS of help) for getting us our banking licence :soon::bank::iphone::credit_card:. This means that I’m the main link between Mondo and the regulators (PRA/Bank of England) and the FCA (Financial Conduct Authority). It also means I both co-ordinate and write the various documents that we need to get our licence. We have submitted more than 3,000 pages of content so far and there’s still more to come!

In the last 24 hours I’ve: reviewed applications for some of the jobs we have advertised, interviewed 2 candidates, met some investors, and been swotting for an interview I have soon at the Bank of England! Oh yes, I’ve also :blue_car: :bullettrain_side: :metro::walking: with my 311 mile commute from home to :mondo: HQ.

I’m now going to nominate…@andys and I hope he posts a picture of his :cat2:

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Thanks @paul

Hi! I’m Andy :wave: and I’m an engineer working on the iOS team :iphone: here at Mondo. :mondo:

I’ve been with the team since January, adding new features and fixing bugs :bug: as well as some architecture changes since we recently adopted Swift for all new development (including migrating our client-side model architecture to Realm)

I’m often working remotely, so when I’m not with the rest of the team in London you’ll find me working from Lichfield, in the midlands, with my two cats :cat: :cat2: .

This week I’m working on some exciting new document and video features related to our on-boarding and KYC processes. This should help us make sure we do everything we can to verify your identity when signing up for an account. :lock:

And since Paul asked so nicely, here’s one of our cats in action:

Next up, for tomorrow I nominate @dom

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Thanks @andys

Hi everyone I’m Dom and I’m one of the backend engineers here which means a typical day can range from integrating with a third party supplier for SMS to doing the backend work for a cool new feature like iOS swipe actions.

Today I spent the first half an hour building my new desk :tools: in our new office. I can’t believe how happy a new desk and chair has made me :smile:. The rest of the day I’ll mostly be doing work on improving our KYC processes (with @andys) so that Mondo can get to know you a little bit better without putting too much burden on you :mag:

For tomorrow I nominate @leah one of the coolest people in fintech (or so she tells us)

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I can vouch for @leah being the coolest person in fintech and :mondo: as she got my :mondo: card to be just before I flew off for a holiday in Singapore where I used my card and it was amazing!

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Is @leah ok? We are looking forward to hearing from you.

:slight_smile:

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Looking forward to the Android app. Happy to help if you need testers.

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Thanks @dom and apologies for the delay (and concern @jacq - I’m very touched :blush:). Since making the list (my first ever list - SO cool) I have to make sure I’m fashionably late for everything to keep up the pretence.

Hey everyone :wave: I’m Leah and I head up the operations at Mondo. This means typically I write a to do list for the day and get a tenth of the way through it before something comes up which is more urgent and ruins all my carefully laid plans. In general, I’m responsible for making sure the programme is running as it should which covers ensuring your card arrives :credit_card:, we know who you are :spy:, your questions are answered :question:, our third parties are happy :smiley_cat: and fighting fraud :muscle:. For a while there was just me so I have a pretty good understanding of how each area works but thankfully the team is now full of extremely talented individuals to make sure your experience is as smooth as possible (you’ll have probably noticed the improvement when they joined :wink:).

Yesterday, I worked through all the outstanding queries the team had on questions you guys had asked. There were quite a few since I had a busy few days at the start of the week preparing for a compliance visit from our issuer (Wirecard) so apologies if any of you had to wait a while for a response because of this! I am also busy investigating the financial reconciliation with Wirecard. Since all the money is held in one account, we need to go through and match the movement of that account to the movement of all the individual accounts to make sure the correct amount is being held. In theory this should be a trivial exercise but it turns out it’s easier said than done! I’m hoping to spend the majority of my time working on that today as well but who knows what little treats will pop up :candy:

I think we’ve almost worked through the team now. Luckily we have a few new people joining on Monday :tada: I nominate @_Ed for the next entry - hopefully he will be a little more timely than me…

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Thanks @leah! Hi everyone, I’m Ed, and I work as a web developer on all our web tools :earth_asia: This includes our website at http://www.getmondo.co.uk and our blog http://www.getmondo.co.uk/blog/ (I hope everyone is following the great stories there :eyes: ) but the largest part of my work is on the internal tools which we create to support everyone in the day-to-day tasks :hammer_and_wrench: These tools for example enable our customer support to answer your questions as efficiently as possible, and support our operations team to improve the merchant data.

Today I’ve been working on our blog. @Sam provided an absolutely amazing design which is a pleasure to implement :heart_eyes: One of the key aspects is to adapt it for different screen sizes to offer everyone a great reading experience​:iphone::computer: :desktop_computer:. In addition, we are looking to add some additional features to make it even more attractive to everyone :rocket:

I nominate @luba for the next entry :hugs:

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Thanks @_Ed!

Hi everyone! I am Luba and I work on Mondo regulation team. I joined Mondo 2 weeks ago, yay :clap:

As a new joiner, I am spending a fair amount of my time helping with Customer support. It’s been great to get to know how everything works, what our users care about and to help resolve issues that you sometimes encounter. It is such gratifying experience as well thanks to all the positive feedback! :smiley:

One of the questions I have been coming across while working on Customer support is: when is Mondo going to become a fully licensed bank?

We cannot wait for this to happen ourselves! We are working hard to make sure we launch as soon as possible and I am part of the team that is driving this process. My focus at the moment is to pull together a detailed plan of all our activities before the Full Launch to demonstrate to the regulator that we have thought about it in depth and can follow through on our plan. Thanks so much Mondo team for your help in pulling this together!

@yehudi you are up next! :grinning:

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Thanks @luba!

Hello! My name is Yehudi (Yeh-Hu-Dee), and I work in Customer Support at Mondo. What this actually means is that I get to chat all day, solve problems, send emojis and hopefully make people smile too! :smile:

I love listening to customers, absorbing feedback and discussing your ideas and suggestions with the wider team. Everyone’s committed to delivering the best possible experience for our users, and it feels great to be a part of such a collaborative team :mondo:

Today I spent my morning responding to customer queries - everything from card colours (fun fact: our current card’s official colour is called “Hot Coral”) to international transactions. During the afternoon we had an ops meeting, and then I hopped back on to queries.

At the moment, my goal is to accumulate as much knowledge as possible, so that I’m able to respond to customers super-quickly. Eventually, I’d love to be able to explore innovative new ways to serve customers. Wonder if anyone’s using Virtual Reality to support customers yet…:sunglasses:

@james, I nominate you!

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Hello! Me again :sunglasses:

I’m an iOS developer here, and lately I’ve been working on data export, since it’s a very commonly requested feature here on the forum :slight_smile:

For the first iteration we’ve added export to CSV and QIF formats, since that covers nearly all of the commonly-used tools (including Microsoft Money). Since there aren’t any libraries for QIF on iOS, that meant getting intimate a very weird data format!

I’ve also been working on the much less glamorous (but very important) automated tests. We use unit tests to cover business logic (using API stubs), snapshots to test UI regressions, API tests to check our models play well with our backend, and integration testing using KIF to test user flows.

Next up, I nominate our awesome new data analyst @dimitri :boom:

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Thank you @james!

I’m Dimitri and I will be looking after Analytics & Data at :mondo:. I’ve joined only a week ago but so far it has been a real pleasure. Mondo has an incredibly dedicated and talented team AND an amazing culture of inclusiveness (hope it’s a real word :thinking:) and transparency. I’m very happy to be a part of it now.

Every new joiner is encouraged to do customer support in the first couple of weeks, which I think is a brilliant idea as you get to experience all the pain points (e.g. with card color or real ones :upside_down: ) and all the excitement some of our customers are going through. I can totally see how it drives the motivation inside everyone of us to build an amazing product.

What I’ve been up to today? As I’m the first full time data person, I’m starting from the ground up with understanding our data and infrastructure. In the next couple of days I will take a closer look at how our sign-up and onboarding user journeys are performing and see how many people we are losing along the way and what we could potentially improve.

Next up is Josh @jgarnham :sunglasses:

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Hey all, looks like we’ve gone full circle! It’s me, Josh, an iOS dev :slight_smile:

Today I’ve been putting the finishing touches on our next update which contains overhauled search functionality that looks even prettier thanks to our awesome designers. Check out the sneak peak here :mag:

Looking ahead of that I’m also working on lots of improvements to the sign up flow to make it clearer to new users the product we offer and what they should expect in the future :crystal_ball:

I’m passing the torch :fire: to @ole for the next diary entry!

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Love this feed and generally the openness and passion you guys are obviously fostering at Mondo. Really goes a long way to humanising the company and building really strong brand affinity that is usually so sorely lacking from the huge, impenetrable behemoths of the existing banking world.

Really interested to see how (and if) this openness will continue as the company grows - as it surely will!

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Thanks @jgarnham! Every other Friday, Mondo works from home. This not only gives a nice break in the routine but also lets you catch up on things that are difficult to do when you are in an office full of noisy colleagues. :relaxed:

However, I am in the office today as I have organised a focus group to discuss how people are controlling their spending. :money_with_wings: The learnings will feed into the budgeting feature we are currently designing.

I am also getting v1.5 - which has new Search :flashlight:- ready to be submitted to the App Store. Fingers crossed, it should be in the App Store sometime next week.

That’s it for me. Have a great weekend everyone! @tristan will be back on Monday to tell what he has been up to… :doughnut:

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