Easy-to-understand and manage investments would be a game changer and might attract a new audience/customer.
I’d love to be able to manage things like pensions, stocks, etc… all in the one place, and move money around easily. These things feel like blackn holes that I don’t have transparency of my finances of.
I really really want to be able to see my Skipton LISA as a pot.
It makes so much sense because the only thing i use the Skipton site for is to view the current balance every now and again, would be quick and easy to see this as a pot 
I’ve said it before, but Monzo should target building societies for integration! Maybe not Nationwide, but the rest of the top 10 or whatever have a super complementary product range (mortgages, savings, ISAs…).
Heck, create a standard API and a streamlined onboarding mechanism and, after the first couple, watch them face to join…
I think you’re right about the two Current Account teams. There’s also the growth team who seem to most work on features with network effects.
Not sure building societies would go for it. They want customers just as much as Monzo do. What’s the attraction in helping customers keep Monzo as their main account?
BEWARE THE +
‘Plus’ basically = a bunch of features users don’t really care about but we need to make money.
Google +
Playstation +
Monzo still feels like exclusive members club - this is precious and easily ruined by creating sub-tribes with different levels of service.
This is a very bad example of the point you are trying to make. Playstation+ is required for online gameplay for the majority of Playstation games. That’s definitely a feature that users care about 
True enough - I’m outdated, on PS3 it used to be a bunch of extra content.
Google+ never made money, it was the Google alternative to Facebook. And after stunning indifference and two large security breaches, they’re shutting it down in a few months anyway. So again, not a great example at all.
In theory, I have no problem at all with Monzo+, as long as it extra things that would always need to be paid for, as ooposed to taking features that were previously free and shoving them behind a paywall.
If the choice is “We can provide this feature if you pay for it” or “We can’t provide this feature”, then I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong for a paid feature to be provided.
Because none of them, Nationwide aside, offer current accounts. If Monzo gets the pitch right (no need to build your own app, access a growing pool of engaged customers) then i could see it being a big win win.
(I’ve wittered on about a variant of this before at some length here)
You’re right paid features are a great way to monetise. My concern is more around branding of the proposition.
I would prefer to see individual paid features than conceptually separating customers onto a premium service such as ‘Monzo plus’. Not least if that entails subscribing to a bunch of features of which you only really wanted half. Reminds me of traditional current accounts offering me all sorts of unrelated and unwanted ‘benefits’ for a monthly subscription.
The overdraft charge is a great example of an add on feature with transparent fees. I would hope the same approach could be replicated for other features without detracting from the all-inclusive brand.
It’s a small thing…I think we’re all excited to see what’s coming in 2019!
I have the nationwide flex plus account and I have indeed jumped onto the insurance pack,I do find it covers my needs with family mobile phone insurance, worldwide family travel insurance and UK car breakdown service, these things are all things that I value and am happy to pay the £13 monthly fee, I have been paying it for a number of years and have only ever made 1 claim for a smashed mobile phone, they dealt with this perfectly. So, much as I’m sure monzo is not relying solely on my to hook up with thier insurance packs the above highlights where they need to be to get my interest.
It would be good to be able to switch on and off additional insurance perks as and when needed, I’m thinking along the lines of the temporary car insurance thing that the like of Cuvva offer, I’ve used this once and it was great.
This 100%
It’s become a bugbear of mine (so I understand it’s by no means other people’s priority!) that the custom budgeting periods was changed in November with the promise of other periods being added.
Nothing has appeared to have been done since.
I’m grateful for the amount of work that’s being put into the app, though when there’s a flurry of half-complete updates that don’t get polished off, it leaves swathes of the app feeling rough around the edges.
I think this is the biggest problem with Monzo’s minimum viable product style of development.
They tend to throw out half baked features asking for feedback and then very rarely revisit them to fix customer issues or build upon them.
I wish there was a sweeper team. Their role being to run behind the feature team tidying up their ‘mess’ and tweaking and improving already existing features.
Where I worked we had a sweeper guy, he followed a top class programmer who was top class at making things work but his weakness was the finished product was or could be visually a bit disjointed so step in the sweeper guy and he made it look like a million dollars, of course it was very much unnoticed how good he was at this until he left.
I feel like this is becoming more and more common nowadays anyway with more Software as a Service becoming the standard for software.
You hear a lot about how ‘MVP and SaaS’ allow faster iterations, quicker bug fixes, more features more often.
And its seems like all of them tend not to come back and fix things as quickly as they imply! (Less about Monzo here and generally the “MVP” model).
I’ve been using YNAB for budgeting for like 4 or 5 years maybe. They released a web version with a subscription model a while ago, and they still haven’t fixed the one dangerous bug/design flaw that allows you to massively go over budget without knowing.
But anyway. It comes down to Innovation vs Maintenance for me. You need both in healthy quantities!
Too much emphasis on minimum, not enough on viable imho.
I think the whole MVP thing is a bit misunderstood, to be honest. It’s about delivering a basic service that maximises initial value to the user. And nothing more.
What an MVP isn’t, or isn’t intended to be, is a buggy or unusable service, or one that doesn’t provide the minimum functionality to do the job for which it’s been intended (i.e. It doesn’t release the intended value to the user).
I’m not suggesting that Monzo is necessarily bug riddled or unusable. But I think that focusing on the development methodology hides what are real problems for users. And which does often give an impression of an unfinished product, or a very obvious work in progress.
Regarding the energy switching idea - I feel like although this is a great idea in principle, I think it’d be a waste of Monzo’s development resource to devote time to such a service. There are a number of firms that already offer this service exclusively (Labrador being a key example). Most don’t charge a fee to the consumer and instead earn revenue in the form of a kickback from the energy suppliers.
Speaking from experience, the service Labrador provides is second to none. This is less to do with the quality of their platform and more to do with the fact that their staff are fully trained on all things energy. They were able to identify what type of smart meter I have and then pair me with a new provider which could take it over and retain that functionality. Unless Monzo is planning on training their staff to the same level I’d say leave it to those who focus on that sector.
From what I’ve rread, I’d eckon that they’d want to automate all aspects of the process.