What would the Community like to see from Monzo Plus in Q4?

[lpoolrob (Rob)]

Continuing the discussion from Q4 Monzo Plus:

For me… regular new offers, and I by regular I mean weekly at the very minimum. Revolution seem to be able to do it.

[SouthseaOne (Michael)]

Additional controls around virtual cards (freezing them, bringing them back to life, renaming them)

[lpoolrob (Rob)]

• frequent (at least weekly) new offers. Even if they are for short time periods (24 hour promos)
• Additional virtual card controls as above
• Virtual cards - link a card to a specific pot

[Revels]

1. Pay Plus from a Pot
2. Virtual Card from a Pot
3. Virtual Card date expiry
4. Virtual Card transaction quantity limit
5. Virtual Card £ limit
6. Frequent Offers
7. Monzo created dashboard template

[MalaiseForever (Ethan)]

Judging from the responses in the Amex Plus thread, I think this may be coming; automatically move funds into a bills pot to pay off a credit card.

I put most of my spending through my Amex and manually move it into a pot. If Monzo could do that automagically for me, I would happily pay for Plus.

Then I wouldn’t need to think about it. And couldn’t double spend if I forgot to move funds into Amex pot.

[BritishLibrary]

There is a very good list over on this high quality poll by resident Pollster @peter_g which may inspire some thoughts.

The top 5 currently being:

• Virtual Cards linked to pots
• More connected providers
• Mobile phone and gadget insurance
• All agencies credit scores in app
• Budgeting across all connected accounts.

But the list there may spark some inpsiration.

My own personal wish list would be:

• Budgeting Overhauled - my ideal being Envelope method style (aka YNAB) - but broadly I think budgeting is a bit wonky right now.
• Option for budgeting within connected accounts.
• Support for joint account for certain features (I currently only see 60% of my data in Plus, others see less…)
• All the possible tweaks you could make to Virtual Cards that @revels mentioned
• Mobile Payment VCards
• Auto-Pot top up based on Connected Account Balance.
• Option to see feed with all connected accounts in it.
• Optimise the “Carousel” display a little (and maybe give some of these options as the dreaded T word, toggle).
• Data Export optimisations (Joint Accounts, better/more meta data, some future proofing)
• I’d love to see some built in IFTTT style functions too

[gmclean]

Budgeting overhauled. I don’t care how, or what model they use, but the current implementation is old and only works for a specific set of users.

But then if Monzo are purely in ‘make money’ mode and no longer in ‘make money better for everyone’ (or whatever their slogan was) then I don’t see that happening. Which is a shame as I still believe there is a gap in the market for a bank that helps people learn how to budget.

[richardcadman]

Hey @gmclean there’s a bunch of discussion internally at how we could make summary better (in its current form) and then what a step-changed summary 2.0 might look like.

Where would you start? What are the biggest problems for you?

[davidwalton (Award Winning Hot Coral Analyst)]

In terms of Summary - this would be fantastic;

We're working on a new look for the Monzo app

This +1 Also the ability to add future transactions manually for known upcoming transactions that aren’t DIrect Debits/Scheduled/etc. transactions. let’s call them ‘ghost’ transactions. A ghost transaction is shown in the future and therefore affects the left-to-spend for that displayed period. And the ability to set a ghost transaction as repeating too. The issue then is what to do when time goes by and the ghost transaction date equals today’s date; Has an actual transaction oc…

(basically, forward planning beyond the current Summary period which takes all committed, scheduled and ‘ghost’ transactions into consideration, with a running balance)

[BritishLibrary]

If I can chime in on it too…

Two things I struggle with - one is that I don’t think all the things in Monzo Budget world ‘play well’ with each other.

You have categories you can set a budget for; but if you overspend in any of them, it’s not like there’s a consequence - I could set my monthly budget as £10k and the app would be happy if I never went over it, depsite never earning that much.

And within this - because you don’t categorise pot transfers, they richness of the data to a pot can be lost.

Then because pots themselves also play a part in your total budget - they sort of act as a ‘holding category’ lets say. I’m accruing money in a pot to pay for my car insurance next year. Every month I put in £50, and when my insurance renews I pay it off in one go.

Every month I’m budgeting these sorts of accruals, but I’ve got no meaningful way to tell the app about it, because it is focused around spending.

For things like monthly true expenses; water bill, internet bill, phone bills etc - these can be somewhat predicted but I don’t think it’s the easiest to be able to plan those events happening in the App.

So, first and foremost, I would take a step back and look at all the ways that ones monthly banking activity is done, and make Budgeting/Summary/Pots/Whatever else - all sort of play together equally.

The 2nd thing - Because I’ve largely ignored budget categories until now (because of a lack of specificity until Plus) - I’m just a bit lost in how I get going if I were to set up a budget from scratch, in Monzo.

So perhaps some form of guided how to would be useful - right now I’m just not motivated enough to get it set up and going because the inertia of changing my system means learning Monzo’s again and I’m sort of left to tap around lots of screens to work out how it all fits together.

[Revels]

@BritishLibrary

Then because pots themselves also play a part in your total budget - they sort of act as a ‘holding category’ lets say. I’m accruing money in a pot to pay for my car insurance next year. Every month I put in £50, and when my insurance renews I pay it off in one go.

And then when your monthly budget is £500 and you transfer £500 in to pay your insurance, it will tell you that you’ve spent all your monthly money without allowing for the inbound transfer from the pot.

[nathanthomson8 (Nathan)]

@BritishLibrary

Then because pots themselves also play a part in your total budget - they sort of act as a ‘holding category’ lets say. I’m accruing money in a pot to pay for my car insurance next year. Every month I put in £50, and when my insurance renews I pay it off in one go

Pot Transfers to be Categorised and Included
This is a big thing for me… i treat pots almost like external accounts which have a specific aim (e.g birthday present, ps5 etc).
So in the same way that i can include a transfer to an external account in my budget by assigning it to a category id like payments to pots to be included as spending in my budget.

That way its alot easier when it comes to making that one off big transaction and just excluding that from summary.

Roundups Categorised Independently
Another thing is if movements to pots where included then roundups, id like to catgeorise the roundups differently to the transaction. For example if i spend 26.20 at tesco i want that 26.20 categorised as groceries but then the 0.80 to be categorised against my category for which im saving towards e.g entertainment if its going to my PS5 pot or so on.

[monzo2018]

Although I would definitely like to see development in Summary/budgeting in the app, one thing I hope never to lose is the “You’re set to have £XX left over” at the end of the current period feature. I love it. It always encourages me to curb spending as the month goes on I don’t mind if there’s tinkering to how the figure is calculated, I just wouldn’t want to lose it .

A simple addition to this that I would like is for it to tell me how much I can spend a day for the rest of the period (left to spend divided by number of days left).

[davidwalton (Award Winning Hot Coral Analyst)]

@monzo2018

…I hope never to lose is the “You’re set to have £XX left over” at the end of the current period feature. I love it. It always encourages me to curb spending as the month goes on I don’t mind if there’s tinkering to how the figure is calculated, I just wouldn’t want to lose it .

Me too

[OliverUK (Oliver)]

My money back?

[Peter_G]

Excellent list!

My personal wish list would be:

• The full Monzo experience for connected accounts (so full transaction details, comprehensive history that doesn’t vanish after x days, ability to add notes, categories etc, enrichment etc)
• Link virtual cards to merchants and add them to Google Pay
• More connected accounts - and present net worth in the app (so link to Zoopla or Right Move to pull in property value, connections to mortgages and investment platforms, and the ability to manually create and update the value in an eternal account - preferably with smart rules like in Emma.)
• Analytics across all accounts. Tell me my average spend, let me interrogate my data and find insights. For me, looking back and assessing is much for interesting and useful than looking forward and budgeting.
• Built in IFTTT stuff. Worth a bigger post, but this is really important! [Edit: post now here]

[Peter_G]

Apologies for the double post, but one thing I forgot:

• The ability to set a pot as an off-set pot. This would mean that you can be overdrawn to the value of the funds in the pot and not pay overdraft fees.

(I know this is standard Starling functionality and some people feel strongly about this - but this isn’t the place to reopen that debate).

[misterm]

Include external accounts in budgeting
Allow for unsupported external accounts to be included in budgeting - is be able to say I have a savings account with £x and include that in budget

YNAB style budgeting would be great

Integration with YNAB would also be great

[Peter_G]

@BritishLibrary

• I’d love to see some built in IFTTT style functions too

@Peter_G

• Built in IFTTT stuff. Worth a bigger post, but this is really important!

Here’s that bigger post:

Monzo Plus and IFTTT

For me, the big surprise of Monzo Plus has been the connected Google sheet. Linked with IFTTT, this has been really useful in doing all sort of little things - especially sweeping my salary into pots automatically when received (and with no manual intervention necessary), keeping my balance ending in 00p at all times. But with IFTTT now becoming chargeable, I won’t be able to use it any more. While there are just two use cases in my list above (salary sweep and keeping balance at 00p), there ar…

If anyone’s interested, jump in and let’s discuss over there. It’d be good to develop a bit of a community proposition for Monzo to mull over!

[Peter_G]

@richardcadman

Hey @gmclean there’s a bunch of discussion internally at how we could make summary better (in its current form) and then what a step-changed summary 2.0 might look like.

Where would you start? What are the biggest problems for you?

Hey @richardcadman, some really basic things for Summary in its current form:

• You can’t label incoming funds as repeating
• Get paid early breaks it
• It’d be good for it to reset whenever Monzo knows that you’ve been paid

Ultimately, though, I think it needs a fundamental overhaul. It seems to me to be a mixture of things, none of which it does very well. In my opinion, Monzo needs distinct places to a) manage current month’s spending, b) look backwards (analytics and insight on spend), and c) look forward (comprehensively budget).