Monzo

“And here we are, 1.2 million customers, 99% through viral mechanics.”

“For us, for Monzo, I think we've just finished that second phase. We're into the third phase of really getting the business model nailed down.”

“I came into Monzo really not believing in brand at all, or design.”

“Do your customers love this product? Is the, I think the only thing that actually matters at that point. I like this question of, to try and figure this out, asking your customers, how would you feel if we took this product away? And it's sort of like, I would…”

“So our growth rate in the last three or four months has doubled based on product growth alone, which is free zero cap.”

“We were pretty deeply loss-making, even on a marginal basis, at the start of the year, and by this summer, we were in a really positive place.”

“Our brand awareness at the moment in the UK is something like 15%.”

“General Catalyst were really keen to do it preemptively. So we didn't go through an enormously drawn out fundraising process. They sort of came in with an offer that we thought was really attractive, and it saved us a time of doing a full fundraising process. …”

“I'm really, really excited about building out this marketplace of products from third parties on the Monzo platform to be a real control center, to let our customers manage all of their money wherever it sits within a single place.”

“I said we've chosen one route clearly, which is to stick with UK retail customers, and it feels like we're 10 or 15% done.”

“Well, I have to say, primarily amongst, it was 95% male, and 95% London so very, very skewed to a certain demographic but it was really powerful and kind of kickstarting that community, so just a lot of hard work.”

“The very early Monzo product was so buggy that people used it because they believed in this mission that we kind of talked a lot about, but the actual product experience was kind of crappy, actually, and it didn't really work, and probably 10% of payments fail…”

“Something like 30% of our customers are in London, but 70% are outside London.”

“55% of our customers are 30 or under.”

“Monzo now has seven million accounts. It's like a 10th of the British population has signed up to this thing.”

“I think if you looked at Realized, it would probably GitHub or Segment. If you look at Unrealized, maybe Benchling or Monzo,”

“It was a sort of 40% down round. I think about 1.3 billion And we got a hundred million, and the company survived.”

“At Monzo, anytime I said anything, A whole team would, like, spring into action, and even if I didn't intend them to do it, I'd be very careful what I said, because literally I'd come back two weeks later and find 30 people had gone off in crazy tangent.”

“So, we intended to be a regulated bank in the very, very start. We acted like that, and it now, 10 years on, we are reaping the rewards of that.”

“I left at a hundred million revenue or so, and it's now almost 10 X that.”

“Our revenue in the next week halved, went down by 50%.”

“We were burning a hundred million a year at the time.”

“I mean, I wouldn't have started Monzo without it, for sure”

“But we got to a million customers with no advertising.”

“It drove me to do Monzo, and drove me to stay at Monzo for a long time after I was happy, and in the years since, it's kind of gone away.”

“And I think TS, the new CEO, and Sajata, the COO, are spectacularly good at that, as well as maintaining the culture and the products. And they've just done such a good job taking it over the, you know, when I left it over the next four years that I couldn't h…”

“The first, absolutely first two, three years at Monzo, we were working like crazy people. I mean, the first 50 people at Monzo were so spectacularly talented, and gave, like, I'm friends with so many of them now still, and they're like, they Bear the scars of …”

“It was profitable.”

“So then we spent the two years getting everyone to put their salary in, and now it's something like 60% of customers put their salary in.”

“I loved the product all the way through, but by the end I hated the company because it got so big and so over-regulated in my opinion,”

“And I had 96 no's in a row for that fundraise to try and do a flat round.”

“When we lost a chief product officer, sorry, chief people officer, she came and did an exec job at Monzo effectively for like four days a week for six months.”

“This is a key skill of a founder, which is holding these two realities in your head simultaneously without the cognitive dissonance or driving yourself crazy. One is the big vision of 10 years. Say the one percent best outcome, if this really, really works, wh…”

“We didn't, of all of the money Monzo has spent so far, probably only three, two or three percent of that was spent on the US, and it didn't get very much management attention.”

“N-twenty-six has failed, Revolut's failed, Monzo's, the first go's failed”

“I think Monzo is just a, it's a more modern bank, like Revolut is a financial ecosystem.”

“So if you think about Revolut against Monzo, right, like the markets we grew the fastest wasn't the UK. It was Ireland, it was Romania, Poland.”

“When I first started working there we didn't actually say the word bank anywhere on the website.”

“I argued very strongly against, against shipping crypto products. You know, I didn't think it was the right thing to do for our audience, for our user base at the time.”

“I would have grown Monzo globally.”

“When a company's scaling as fast as we were, you need to make sure that, again, back to the point about a regulated industry, that the controls scale alongside as well, and you don't want to pick up debt on the control side.”

“The staggering numbers, Harry, more than 600,000 customers have turned that on.”

“We have north of ten million customers now, Harry, right?”

“Our ARPU is significantly higher than any competitor, right? The stickiness of revenues is higher than anybody else, right?”

“It's about a 145 pounds. On the retail side. And 505 150 on the small business side.”

“Ireland is our beachhead into Europe, right? That's the regulatory region we want to work with, and that's where we want to domicile out of.”

“We add over 200,000 new users a month. The vast majority of those are word of mouth.”

“The third is transaction based revenues, interchange FX and so on. The third is on balance sheet lending. When customers take out an unsecured borrowing product from us, loan or an overdraft or Monzo flex. And then the last one third is what I describe as good…”

“When we launched our investments product, I literally did one press interview, and by that evening, we had a 150,000 customers add themselves to the waiting list for the Monzo investments product.”

“We know that getting it right actually creates a moat around our business in a very, very important way.”

“When we're building a product that is about meeting all the needs that your wallet has, it's by definition going to be a diversified revenues, which by the way is a high quality business model because it's not, it isn't hostage to, you know, economic cycles an…”

“We intend to meet all of these needs of a customer, right? Budget, borrow, spend, save, insure, invest, all of that In a single place, right? That's what we're building.”

“The legacy players were never going to fix it. For the, with the best of intent and the best of wanting to do it was never gonna get fixed by incumbents, right? And the history of incumbents transforming their industries is anyways very, very sketchy. And for …”

“Because I would start my day at two or three every morning, which is already 10 o'clock or 11 o'clock in the morning here in London.”

“Do you know how many times more likely it is That a customer uses the word love when they're writing a review about Monzo? Seven times more likely than anybody else, right?”

“I don't have another bank account in this country, by the way.”

“Let's talk about cryptocurrency trading. That's a good one, where we chose to not do it, right? Because letting the average customer Buy a hundred cryptocurrencies because we could make a buck off of it. Just felt not on mission at all.”

“We were running out of capital, and there was COVID on our revenues that had fallen off of a cliff. Monetization was lagging the user growth.”

“A mission without a business plan is a bumper sticker.”

“So the goal was, you know, of course we will offer all sorts of asset classes in time, but really build it around helping customers understand what they're doing,”

“Because we're not looking to go in with a banking license. The U.S. FinTech industry has this well-established model of a partner bank, a sponsor bank, and most of the U.S. FinTech industry operates with that model. So we, that's what we're doing. So working, …”

“One is, you know, we already know how to operate in a highly regulated context. So the gap between a tech company like us versus another tech company that just doesn't have to deal with scrutiny it's pretty wide. So we're, the gap for us from here to becoming …”

“We have the luxury of time, right? We have the gift of time because we have plenty of capital to build out our ambition, and not only that, we have extraordinarily supportive investors, patient, but also supportive as in, like, would give us more capital if we…”

“So even now, right, when I say to you that we're, when I look ahead, I think globally there will be a handful of companies only in the next decade that will truly be doing this business at scale. And managing people's money, transforming that relationship that…”

“We raised two hundred fifty million pounds. I mean, we did the down round within minutes after I started, like three weeks after I started, and then we topped up that down round over the next six months.”

“In the next round, whenever we do it, we'll get the big institutional investors. So right now we have a few. We have GIC and others who are, you know, institutional investors. But I think our journey looking ahead is not VC names.”

“Here we are, right, the largest UK digital bank and, you know, so much more.”

“So one of the products that we were really interested in building out was energy switching. And we shut that down, I want to say a year or two years ago now almost.”

“Mortgages as an example, I don't think we will ever do it on our own balance sheet, but we already are making mortgages visible to our customers Even if they've not, if it's not a Monzo mortgage, they've taken it from somewhere else in the app, leveraging our …”

“You can get that same ARPU, even if someone's not using you as the main bank, but takes out another bigger product from you can get similar ARPUs.”

“If we choose to not charge for things where we transparently and with the customer and where we believe we're adding value to the customer, if we choose to not charge it, and we see that as somehow being a mission thing to do, it's effectively saying I'm doing…”

“You know, an investor that I would have spent months working on in 2020, and they're that close, and I know that it's gonna be pivotal for us, and it changes our story, because on the back of that, I will be able to raise more capital, and they don't pull the …”

“Like angel investing in GoCardless. If I look at some of the other angel investors in that business, they were non-doms. They were actually Europeans, some Americans. The founders of that business built an important company for London, employing hundreds of pe…”

“Oh, sub four billion.”

“Revolut out-shipped the shit out of Monzo on new products.”

“There wasn't any differentiation in product roadmap. But what differentiated between, you know, us and everyone else was basically ambition and the speed of execution.”