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"Long says she doesn’t see how Monzo can become profitable without a “radical change” to its business model."

In the article they allude to Monzo not doing much (enough?) lending, such as offering mortgages or credit cards.

This is a very interesting point about what a bank is supposed to be. Starting to sound like that's all a bank can do to become profitable (this is obviously not true, data-mining customer purchasing behaviour has to be a really strong option as well), but that's not my main point. The main point is that Monzo, at least initially, lead with an extremely attractive, mobile-focused, well-designed online experience. They had the 'hip'-factor going for them (I vividly remember, while working at various advertising agencies, how suddenly everyone had the bright-neon-orange debit cards).

Later they also had a reputation for being crypto-friendly, which made a lot of my techie friends get an account with them, after the horror-stories of other banks just closing people's accounts for trading crypto.

But it would appear that customer numbers and a modern attitude alone are not enough to make a bank profitable.

Some more random tidbits: Here is a talk on Go microservices architecture by Matt Heath https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiCru2zIWWs

I think this may have been hotly debated on HN as well. It seems they are running well over 1,000 Go-backed microservices these days. This is just staggering. My little project is at a grand total of 4, and I find I spend enough time on interop, to have almost considered monolithing the whole thing again.

And a last one, for a chuckle, here's Halifax's (then) design agency using Monzo assets in a Halifax design deck, presumably because Halifax wanted to modernise their offering and 'be like Monzo': https://www.thedrum.com/news/2019/04/15/monzo-clashes-with-h...

Monzo seem to be pursuing upsell as a strategy. As a customer it's becoming quite annoying to constantly be asked to upgrade to "Monzo Plus" or the even more ridiculous "Monzo Premium" offerings.

I wonder whether this strategy is working for them.

From the outside it appears like the business is now focused on the US retail market - replacing Blomfield with a CEO based in the US certainly sends a strong signal that they've more or less given up on the UK retail banking market.

This is correct. With interest rates so low (central bank policy), and payment revenue in Europe and the UK low (interchange fees are regulated, instant payments are ubiquitous and cheap), your only options to make ends meet are lending revenue or charging a nominal fee for banking services. This is also part of the argument for central banks directly offering deposit accounts to citizens, as it's a utility with little to no profit available to commercial banks (who could instead focus on lending).

A modern UX does not pay the bills, but it is nice to have.

It is rather baffling why they haven't produced products that would traditionally make a ton of money, like a credit card or SIPP. I hope they succeed though. The traditional banking sector sucks.