If you have Monzo and haven’t gone full Monzo, why not?
What is it that’s stopping you? What features do you need that are preventing this from happening? What does Monzo do that you need it to not do?
I’m asking this because most of the time when I ask people why they haven’t gone full Monzo, I always get the same answer which is “I don’t need to” or a variant of that - people don’t see a need to go full Monzo and they see Monzo as optional extra
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Anarchist
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Exactly that. Why would I want to go full any bank?
All banks have features which will appeal to some people, but as far s as I can see, there isn’t a bank which has all the features I want.
Santander has cashback for Direct Debits. Nationwide has a good packaged account. TSB has a good rate of interest. Monzo has instant notifications.
I use Monzo because I value having my spending kept separate from my bills and income. I chose Monzo because it was recommended as a prepaid card for foreign spending and now use it as my spending account. If I could be bothered, I’d probably be better off changing to Starling just for the current account interest, and the colour of the Monzo card is beginning to get on my nerves.
I have Monzo [and Starling - and Dozens) primarily for holiday spending and as insurance against the risk of one of them going off-line or being stolen/compromised in some way.
If Monzo had been around in 1989 [when I joined FD] I may well have made them my main bank.
Mostly because I like having bills and spending money in separate accounts, plus I benefit from the features of other banks that Monzo does not yet offer --I still use cheques from time to time; need international payments for my Amazon seller account etc
The main reason for me is that the odd time I do receive cash and want to deposit it I want to be able to do so without paying a fee (even if it is a quid). I also just like having money in another account in case something goes wrong with either bank.
NatWest give me cashback on my household bills, if I go fullmonzo I lose money.
I’ve also wanted custom categories for a very long time. Well actually just one more category, gifts. Give me this and I would go fullmonzo for the convenience of having my budgeting in one place.
I was full Monzo, now I’m not. For the simple being that Natwest give a good switching bonus but to qualify I need to have a certain amount incoming into the account. So I simply asked my company to pay my wage into that. Still use Monzo for day to day but ultimately I think it is a good idea to have more than one bank account anyway. Each have their own positives and negatives and the age of consumer loyalty is dead.
No cheque imaging, support is slow to respond to chats other than simple tasks which are quick, phone support useless and Monzo only report to one CRA (this is what made me switch away back to a legacy bank). Also was Monzo plus customer as well, but this was a total mess.
I also hate it when people say ‘Oh that’s because you use Monzo’ when I can’t get a phone contract on Vodafone for example because they don’t report to two CRA’s (but then Monzo is trying to be a challenger bank and be better than existing ones).
I took out a Vodafone contract via Carphone warehouse and apparently Monzo doesn’t report to the CRA that Vodafone check so I had to set up a legacy bank account.
I don’t think it’s wise to go full any bank. I will always keep around 3 bank accounts for redundancy. Just in case one of my accounts is frozen based on false accusation of fraudulent activity. I also think Monzo should not be encouraging people to go full Monzo as it’s against their own interest.
That has actually happened to me before and I was lucky to have had money split across multiple accounts so I did not need to beg friends to help pay my bills, rent and put food on the table. It actually took several weeks for my account to be unfrozen so it was unpleasant few weeks.
Additional reason why I will not go full Monzo would be that it is still a startup and not profitable. Until I can see that it has become a public company that is profitable and sustainable (4 profitable quarters in a row) I will only keep my spending money in Monzo but will keep my savings and larger sums in my other bank accounts.
Finally, I need other features Monzo does not offer like credit card, interest, international payments. So currently I only use Monzo to pay for daily expenses in case my amex card is not accepted (for example at Costa). Otherwise I don’t use it.
(I’m considering full monzo to be using it as my main bank, holding my primary cash flow and using it for the majority of payments)
Personally in the context above, my main concern is with support, especially when I have time sensitive payments to make. I have some worries about potential issues if I need to make a payment. I need to be able to call my bank and have it fixed in 5 or 10 minutes. I don’t want to have to worry that if a payment fails or something goes wrong that I can’t get someone to resolve it right then and there so I can make payments on time.
For example I recently had a large payment for a new tenancy to make that was time sensitive. I need to trust that I know I can get in contact with my bank and have issues resolved in a timely manor. I need to know that my bank will treat time sensitive issues as time sensitive.
For the moment a lot of that trust for me is gone. Hope it comes back but at least personally I think there’s a lot of rebuilding that needs to be done in terms of having responsive customer service and rebuilding trust in it.
Apart from that, a lot of the features monzo has everyone else has, and some of the monzo unique features don’t work well. (For me(