Everything requires technology and no one is saying/has said otherwise.
Technology enables everything, otherwise you’d be getting this response in 2-3 days by Royal Mail Second Class post (I only use First Class for birthday cards).
Here’s a pretty good example. They focused on adding Pots for Joint Accounts (technology feature) and have still not delivered on providing Overdrafts for Joint Accounts (banking feature).
Of course both require technology but one is a pure software view of your money tagged within your account, the other is a pure bank offering of a line of credit which you pay to use if required.
No one is asking for Monzo to stop improving their app and software features, there are just some glaring omissions from the core banking services you’d want to see.
Gosh I couldn’t agree more with this post. Stop thinking large product launches and incrementally add banking value each week and you will persuade more full Monzo and word of mouth attract even more customers…
I think we do this, but we don’t shout about it in the same way we do when launch big products.
Sometimes it might be adjusting a feature slightly, sometimes it might be squashing bugs to make a feature work more effectively. These are always outlined in the release notes on each App Store.
I appreciate it is different for everyone but a joint account with an overdraft is a standard offering from all banks.
My wife and I pay all of our bills and food shopping etc. from our Joint Account. That includes our mortgage and credit card repayments.
I therefore want an overdraft to be sure that if there are delays in salary (which have happened to my wife a few times) that we have an overdraft that will allow the mortgage payments to go through and not show as a missed payment on our credit report.
Having just basically re-built our house and having just had a child with my wife on maternity leave we have unfortunately needed our overdraft a lot more in recent months. It gives us extra flexibility if we need it.
I personally would never have a joint account without one.
I’m in the same boat as you - my SO and I use two Joint Accounts - one for routine bills, with an overdraft, which acts as somewhat of an ‘emergency buffer’ in case something drastic goes wrong with our usual inflows in the month.
And we use a Monzo joint for all the ‘day to day’ joint spending - an overdraft here would be nice to have again, because again it’s a useful buffering tool.
My partner and I use our joint account more as an easy way of managing our extra money. That’s due to how we manage our finances though. I pay pretty much all the bills from my account, and she pays for the car, our holidays and all our food shopping etc from hers.
We keep our finances pretty much separate, so our joint account isn’t actually used that much.
As somebody who switched my full account to Monzo, I find it mildly offensive that so much effort is going into this, yet, it’s impossible to speak to somebody immediately about finances.
What’s the point of a chat function that takes days to respond? What’s the point in a phone line that nobody answers?
You can’t build a profitable business by getting a few people to pay a small amount for gimmicks. Just build a better bank, that is scalable and delivers on the core strategy.
I just can’t get my head around this waste of time and resources. The app isn’t entirely self-serving yet. Nobody wants to pay for it. This isn’t scalable in its current form.
I agree that is what the fast adopters of technology want but they are leaving people behind. There are people that do not understand the Internet let alone using your phone instead of a physical card. There is a whole raft of people to whom you are saying ‘We do not want your custom unless you keep up to date with technology’. In the end banks such as Monzo will only survive if it can attract enough customers and deposits. If it pushes itself into a niche technology offering it will fail. At the moment I am experimenting with Monzo and treating it like a cash machine, ie. I put into my account sufficient for my day to day spending and using the card instead of cash. I certainly will not move my main accounts to Monzo whilst the technology is in such flux and my decision will be based on financial services available not the latest fad. Is Monzo a bank run by technologists or bankers.
I think this speaks volumes about the way Monzo is headed, not to mention the comments earlier in the week comparing Plus to other paid-for offerings from the likes of Strava. Do Monzo want to be a bank, or do they want to be just another app that happens to have banking-like features?
The support; the international payments; and other basic banking features like joint account overdrafts and web browser access need sorting before trying to develop Plus, or even expanding to the US.
The lack of some of the basics you’d expect of a bank is what stops me from going full Monzo. I feel the need to keep a foot in the door of another bank just in case Monzo runs out of cash and goodwill. As with a lot of these apps, they often do burn through VC money and go belly up suddenly and spectacularly, yet apart from some of the overly leveraged investment banks prior to 2008, many have been around for decades and will continue to be around in the future.
Travel insurance - as and when I need it. So a simple ‘click - ‘I am on holiday’ and then a ‘click I have returned’ would be great, such that you pay for only what you use.
If you look at my year I have been abroad this year around 45 days, so paying an annual fee is ridiculous.
Phone insurance - yes.
Nothing else springs to mind at present, no doubt that as soon as I submit this, many things will.
I’d be interested in short term car insurance if economic vs classic car insurance which I have to take out for a year athe beginning of summer and cancel in autumn!
In this scenario, don’t forget that you would want cover from when you book your travel plans, just in case something happens that means you can’t travel.
You raise a good question that has always bugged me when i use to do my travel insurance by trip as opposed to annually like i do now.
If you select the date range and then your flight home is delayed by say a day… does that mean that if you lost your bag on the flight home it wouldn’t be insured because it is no longer in your agreed “trip”?
I couldn’t agree more. But is anyone listening? Apparently not. I have just about had enough of feedback not being listened to - it’s not our fault that the feedback is primarily negative, is it. Don’t shoot the messenger.
I am now voting with my feet and actively moving funds out of Monzo. Not only am I not going Full Monzo, I don’t even want to be Part Monzo any more. It seems to me that Monzo wants to run before it can walk, and is neglecting its most important asset, its customers and their goodwill. The pretence of customer and investor participation is not working on me anymore, and has become irritating in the extreme. Even the software isn’t working properly and deficiencies are presented as improvements. Enough.
The single thing that sets monzo apart for me is summary/budgets, the mew nav made me browse a few other banks but while summary is still intact (albeit in the background) i have my spending set up as it works for me.
This seems to be considered a basic afterthought from reading the forum, while bill pots and salary sorter are lauded as revolutionary. Salary sorter is something i already so better by myself with scheduled pot deposits and SO’s while bill pots, while nice, can basically be done using other banks through a 2nd account.
While hypothetical, these seem to be the features suggested as premium but to me, seems like mostly hype.
Keep app features free and charge for services if they can be improved.
I dont want my bank to be a software company, just to have a really good software department
