If you’ve been using Monzo in the US for at least a few months, you’ll likely remember earlier this year when we sent an email and in-app notification asking you to help us by filling out a quick survey.
We’ve already been using those results quite a bit as we plan for the future - but we wanted to take a moment to share some of the interesting findings.
Let us know if there’s anything else you’re curious about with this data 
This is really interesting!
I have to ask though, it seemed like you were happily surprised by the user ages, but to me that looks like you aren’t appealing to about half the population! Any plans to address that?
There’s another interesting detail around budgeting though - when we asked users what kind of financial apps they regularly use on their phone, only 27% of users said they used a standalone budgeting app……To be quite honest, we didn’t expect this! Especially after seeing how many of our users self-identified as budgeters - we thought there would be more users regularly using a third-party app to fill that gap.
In relation to this, I’m interested in whether US users can connect 3rd party budgeting apps to Monzo? Some months ago I seem to remember a number of requests related to inability to use Plaid with Monzo US.
Also interested if it’s known how many UK Monzo users use a 3rd party budgeting app or how many have a 3rd party service connecting to their Monzo account via open banking?
We were pretty surprised - mostly by how close in percentage the 25-34 and 35-44 age groups were.
But, like you point out, some of the other age groups are pretty small - especially the 18-24 demographic (which you might expect to be higher given the fact that fintechs historically appeal to a younger crowd).
We’ve talked to a lot of people across those three age groups (as well as people 44+) - and we’ve been hearing a lot of similar pain points with the banking system. Since the pain points seem to be pretty universal - we are working to build features that solve those (many of which we’ve already solved in the UK 
So also a lot of porting/adapting UK features).
We hope that by building features that everyone seems to be asking for, we’ll even out some of the unbalanced demographics we currently have 
If in the future we feel the need to get more users from a certain age group, we’ll make some announcements about new features/etc that those users are looking for.
Right now our accounts don’t connect with many third party budgeting apps (with a few exceptions of apps that take advantage of our API, like DAS Budget built by @while-loop).
But for this survey, we polled all users (active Monzo users and non-Actives alike). When we look at both of those groups separately - both of them seem to have roughly the % of people who use budget apps (which is to say, not a large %).
Though definitely a good callout that if you are an active Monzo US user currently, you are probably not likely to use a third party budgeting app since you can’t sync the two directly. Definitely was on our minds as we interpreted the data 
Honestly not 100% sure if the UK has similar data here - they probably do, but also not sure how public they are willing to make that info (different data privacy laws and different stakes given # of users)
I do think some of this is due to traditional banks being pretty good at advertising to university students with free accounts for the time they’re studying. For example, when I started my undergrad, I was advertised to by a local credit union with a branch on campus as well as two or three different traditional banks offering free banking for students. I was already using an online-only bank for my non-cash needs but I’d only heard of them through a friend who was also using their services.
For some others, it’s being able to take advantage of their parents’ existing banking relationships to get additional benefits they couldn’t get on their own (for example, being able to “inherit” Chase Private Client, Citigold, or similar status).
And that’s aside from the fact that Monzo in the US has been mostly “marketed” by word of mouth for the past while, so it’ll mostly be people with friends in the UK or have friends who already have Monzo in the US who have heard of it.
I think the 18-24 crowd will become a larger part of the user base as Monzo improves, but there definitely needs to be some more efforts made.
Completely agree - I’ve seen first hand how many university students user certain banks just because that’s what their parents set up for them when they were in high school. And then, like you said, some local banks/credit unions will partner with the college to market their services.
We do have some ideas already about how we can increase growth for 18-24 year olds already - just a matter of when the best time will be to use those tools.
As someone in that small 18 to 24-year-old age group, I really enjoy what Monzo has to offer, but I’m more excited about what’s on the horizon!