One for the wish list - I would love for Monzo to correctly differentiate and categorise grocery versus fuel spending at the major supermarkets.
I know that at Tesco and Sainsburys, fuel station transactions usually have ‘PFS’ appended to the supplier name, so surely Monzo should be able to see that these are petrol and not grocery transactions?
I’m a long distance driver, so am constantly forgetting to re-categorise these and am having groceries marked as fuel and vice versa.
Come on, Monzo! I believe that Starling and Yolt can already do this
it does feel that Monzo haven’t “done” anything for ages to improve the observable user experience , as an Alpha pre paid user of over 2 years now CA user - it felt like improvements were coming thick and fast almost every month, now it just seems everything is coming soon or not so soon - whilst I appreciate you have been doing a lot behind the scenes for CAs, 1/2 attempted pots etc , there seems from a customer perspective that development has stopped - which Im sure it hasn’t -
but in no particular order things that have been asked for repeatedly for 6-12 + months
set start dates for targets
credits coming off targets
some form of joint accounts - both Monzo and Starling are struggling with this
We’re knee-deep in revamping Spending/Targets right now It’s a big project but will bear fruit soon.
CASS is very close
Overdrafts are already here for a great deal of people and very shortly everyone will be able to check whether we can offer them one
Joint accounts are the furthest away, unfortunately. I think we sketch it out properly and set a timeline once prepaid shuts down and we don’t have that to worry about
without much in the form of updated functionality, us forum nerds seem to just be going over and over and over things that aren’t being offered by Monzo rather than - wow what a great feature this or that is, how can it be improved, what do we like about it, what don’t we like - sorry hijacked the supermarket thread - we all want everything now
I feel like a lot of the initial traction was lost and many promises - e.g. Android application parity have slipped beyond what feels like an acceptable length of time.
I’ve been a huge supporter of Monzo and have been desperate to invest since missing the last crowdfunding exercise, but as time goes on - I don’t know, I’m not so keen as the organisation no longer feels like the young, sprightly upstart that it once was.
Everything is feeling a little half baked at the moment and (dare I say it), I’d switch back to my legacy banking provider (Nationwide) if they could offer instant payment notifications.
I’m hoping that now the current account has been rolled out, we’ll see milestones met and a more polished experience going forward
I am hoping that I’ll be convinced to invest some money in you if you can get this right!
[edit!
I’m also a little surprised that some of the real basic features are still not here - the really important things. Like having arrangements in place to pay in cash at PayPoint/certain banks ;-)]
In terms of us not being a young, sprightly upstart… I feel the same. We aren’t. When I started almost 18 months ago we had 40 or so employees and a tiny office, and I got the chance to meet and get to know the vast majority of my colleagues over the first few months, even as a remote worker who only went in to the office every now and then! Now we have 300 employees, there’s entire teams I’ve never even met, and it’s harder to find the point person for specific information that I’m trying to find out. So we have to work on that internally in that sense, and we have to work on our communication both internally and externally to keep the community happy and engaged, which is something I’ve been spending time on - the Community Q&A’s being just one of those ideas to keep the wider community in the loop of what we’re working on
So I sympathise from multiple viewpoints, but the reality of the situation is that yeah… we aren’t a rocketing startup that can continue the initial pace we set. However, we’re a “proper company” now, which is a position that most startups never get to, and so priorities change. We have to start looking at reducing costs and starting to be profitable, because you can’t keep burning through VC cash if you want to survive. It’s why we had to make the tough decision to completely pause a lot of things that fall into being “feature requests”, customer-facing things, because of our change in infrastructure and the massive amount of engineering work that required.
We’re super excited that we announced the end of prepaid today. Once that’s a thing of the past, with the additional power it frees up, I believe we can increase the pace again and start hitting all of these things.
With regards to your point about basic features and important things - If I’ve learned one thing, it’s that nobody can agree on what’s important and what isn’t! For me - for example - I haven’t had to pay in cash into a bank account in at least 5 years. Maybe more. Not to say it’s not a feature worth pursuing - just that for some people it will be more important than others, and you can say the same thing about almost every feature request.
TL:DR - Company growth is hard, both internally and externally. We have a vision that we’re trying to achieve that isn’t an easy one, and a lot of challenges will come along the way, some of which we’ll foresee and some that we won’t! But as long as we’re transparent and open along the way, we’ll be fine
Thanks for the detailed reply, Simon - that made some interesting reading!
I’ve still got my account, which I use for my day-to-day banking with salary paid in and a full complement of direct debits. So, I’m confident that you will get there and I appreciate that you have to shift to a profitable, mature organisation.
I would like to be at the point where I don’t have to rely on my legacy bank for the ‘missing’ features - such as being able to pay in cash or withdraw larger sums of money.
Keep up the good work and keep engaged with the community as you’ve all been doing. It is a refreshing approach - and that’s what kept me with Monzo and not Starling
Over the years the established players have provided for their customer’s needs. What makes the Monzo offering exciting is fee free foreign transactions, separate pots in one account and the instantness of everything from notifications to setting it up. To stop burning VC cash and turn a profit Monzo will need customers. The mass market will not be wanting NFC pay immediately but they will be expecting a working bank account.
