🎉 Year in Monzo is here! 🎉

[jackcully]

Hello you lovely lot, you.

I’m super excited to finally tell you that Year in Monzo is back! It’s been a huge team effort over the last three months to come up with, design and build a brand new Year in Monzo experience fit for 2023 and I’m so excited that you all get to see it TODAY.

Just open your app to get started.

Creating a shareable moment for Monzo customers in 2023

Year in Monzo is all about creating an end-of-year moment to reflect on how you’ve spent the year (for better or for worse!), and those of you that have been around a while will remember that we’ve done this a few times in the past.

We wanted to take the best of what we’ve done before then give it a little more, so we challenged ourselves to think bigger.

So this year’s experience is 2023-themed, and nothing sums up 2023 better than…

Main character energy

It started with some brainstorming – we wanted to bring Year in Monzo back as a moment that would spread across social media and in customers’ group chats.

And after surveying the social landscape of 2023, it was clear to us that people were embracing main character energy this year – from sharing your girl dinners to being in your flop era, 2023 was all about cinematising your life, so we wanted to lean into that and make 2023 a celebration of you (and of course, your spending).

Our goal with Year in Monzo is to make an experience that people want to share. It should make people feel seen, make them giggle and ultimately send theirs to their followers, family and friends.

To translate that into a business objective, it’s all about brand love and brand awareness – building an experience that really delights people, that they hopefully share, that in turn creates a big moment around Monzo.

We aim to make the experience (and the conversation around it) feel like something people really want (and really want to be a part of). You should feel a bit like you’re missing out if you don’t use Monzo a lot or you don’t have Monzo at all!

Your eras era

I won’t spoil the whole experience here, but one of my favourite new additions this year is that you’ll all get your own 2023 era – based on how you’ve spent, saved, travelled or managed money with your friends. It’s meant to be playful and tongue-in-cheek, and Monzonauts who’ve tested it internally have said they’ve felt super seen.

We’ll be writing more about how we built this Year’s Year in Monzo

You’ll see a series of blog posts coming out over the (week) that will go into more detail about the technical, design, and writing efforts that went into this. Stay tuned!

Year in Monzo covers your account data from the start of the year until October 31st.

That’s to give us time to make sure everyone’s data is accurate, and to build it.

So any other activity on your account after that date won’t appear in the experience.

Let’s see your Year in Monzo results

Head to your app now and you’ll see your Year in Monzo on the Home screen. I want to see all your eras! So as a starter for ten, here’s mine…

Yes, apparently I used Lime bikes a lot. Which is terrible considering I have my own bike

[davidwalton (Award Winning Hot Coral Analyst)]

Gulp. Here goes…

[jackcully]

May the odds be ever in your favour…

[davidwalton (Award Winning Hot Coral Analyst)]

EDIT: Oh, no Joint account support. So because I rarely use my Personal account it isn’t exactly accurate (although I am in the top 5% of spenders at my local wine bar )

Nicely done team, nicely done

[jackcully]

@davidwalton

EDIT: Oh, no Joint account support. So because I rarely use my Personal account it isn’t exactly accurate (although I am in the top 5% of spenders at my local wine bar )

Ah, your joint should spending should be included here!

We don’t call it out explicitly, but Year in Monzo takes spending across Personal, Flex and Joint Account cards. We show your top categories, and then spending across Eating Out, Entertainment and Shopping across all three – any chance the transactions you’re expecting aren’t in those categories?

[davidwalton (Award Winning Hot Coral Analyst)]

The overall number of transactions seems very low - and the expected vendors don’t seem to be being reported - if Joint account & Flex are included. I’ll have a dig into it

[chrisjamesgunn (Monzo Plus Member)]

Thanks for creating it! But was there any reason to exclude the numbers? E.g you spent X in the last year at X place. Instead of just saying you spent there 50 times. The numbers is always the best bit…

[jackcully]

@davidwalton

The overall number of transactions seems very low - and the expected vendors don’t seem to be being reported - if Joint account & Flex are included. I’ll have a dig into it

Drop me a DM if something doesn’t look quite right

[jackcully]

@chrisjamesgunn

Thanks for creating it! But was there any reason to exclude the numbers? E.g you spent X in the last year at X place. Instead of just saying you spent there 50 times. The numbers is always the best bit…

We’ve actually never used £ amounts in Year in Monzo for spending – we do this because we think Year in Monzo should be more about seeing which merchants you interacted with over the year, and how frequently.

That’s because people are often shy to share how much they spent publicly, but are much happier to share how many times they went. As we want people to share their results far and wide on social media, we opted for the latter!

[coffeemadman (Jonathon 🏳️‍🌈)]

Ironically I hate those drinks.

[cookywook (Richard Cook)]

coffeemadman

Username checks out.

[andrew_fishy (Biggest horse fanatic in Leeds)]

[davidwalton (Award Winning Hot Coral Analyst)]

Sussed it out - there’s a ton of mis-categorised transactions involved. I’ve corrected the bulk of them now, but a question - is the data used to generate the report ‘fixed’ (at the Monzo side) before access?

I’ve changed most of the categories now, but the results are the same as before when I run Year-in-Monzo again, so I suspect it is accessing fixed data, rather than pulling it on request.

2024’s New Years resolution: check transaction categorisation better

[Revels]

Top 10% at Amazon.

I need to calm down!

[andrew_fishy (Biggest horse fanatic in Leeds)]

I was top 20% on Amazon

[ahj87 (Andrew)]

[dinosm]

When you spend almost as much on your hobby as on food…

[ndrw]

[andrew_fishy (Biggest horse fanatic in Leeds)]

Same here, I’ve got A lot of general transactions that shouldn’t be

[dinosm]

This looks really good, and creates some interesting visuals to share with friends!

I have a question: could Monzo not have included transactions from all connected accounts? Surely they could have asked for consent to use that data for this purpose… it would create a much more complete and accurate picture.

For example, my screenshot above, while funny, is not accurate; I make lots of transactions on groceries using other cards like Chase and another joint account card, so there’s a lot of grocery spend that’s not showing. Hopefully Monzo can consider this for next year.