Monzo midsummer madness
Last Saturday was one of the hottest June days on record and it didn’t feel like the sort of weather you would spend the best part of a day indoors.
However having applied to attend the “Monzo Investival” which was subsequently oversubscribed I felt a duty to attend. My one concession to the weather and the fact it was a Saturday was to gamble on wearing shorts - I needn’t have worried - long pants were few and far between and the CEO Tom Blomfield had added flip flops to his (okay that’s probably a step too far for me).
Monzo is a digital only UK based bank which started up in 2015.
As both a beta customer (back in the days when they didn’t have a banking license and it was a prepaid card proposition) and an investor I was genuinely interested in finding out a little bit more about what made Monzo tick.
Clearly they are doing something right - their valuation has doubled to 2 billion GBP in the last 8 months and seeing a ‘shocking coral pink’ Monzo card around London, increasingly the UK and now on global excursions is no longer a novelty.
People have a love / hate relationship with those cards (I’ve just opted for a dark blue one as part of a new MonzoPlus bundle) but they generated A LOT of spontaneous conversation - not a common occurrence amongst busy Londoners.
This was a full day and all of us only experienced the half of it because they divided the day into “Building Monzo the Business” and “Building Monzo the Product”. I went with the business focus.
I had expectations that this would be insightful but I was not prepared for the honesty and candor throughout every presentation. This is a company that embraces mistakes and failures, remedies them, learns from them and then moves on. Quickly.
And of course rather than throw a saccharine gloss over E V E R Y T H I N G - the way a regular / legacy bank would do - by being transparent they simply made their achievements and customer satisfaction all the more remarkable.
This is a “challenger bank” that clearly thrives on challenge with it’s now 1,000 or so employees allowed to be honest. The corporate comms person inside me winced a little at times but, without exception, every speaker left you with little doubt this was an enterprise that would succeed.
FinTech is a difficult beast - all the energy of a start-up but in a highly regulated environment where failure (to the end user) is not an option. Therefore their honesty about missteps was refreshing because the fast recovery from them gave a real insight into the culture of the organisation.
At the end, Tom Blomfield (flip flops and all) urged us to start having our salaries paid directly into Monzo. The hurdle for many of these start-up banks is they they are the secondary or even tertiary accounts for most users. Monzo suffers less here with much more regularly active accounts but the more transactional throughput the better. That requires customers having confidence and it felt like they had earned that from everyone in the room.
As I emerged blinking onto a very sun scorched London sidewalk I reflected that I had made the right choice and spent the day in the company of people who are monetizing honesty.
About The Author
The author is a brand consultant and founder of Mission Critical, a highly focused and curated weekly briefing for time poor and information hungry decision makers and THE FIRST, a monthly briefing containing 31 inspirational insights.
