The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 76 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Stebbings: Revolut Out-Shipped Monzo On New Product Releases
“Revolut out-shipped the shit out of Monzo on new products.”
TS Anil: Monzo's ARPU Outperforms All Competitor Digital Banks
“Our ARPU is significantly higher than any competitor, right? The stickiness of revenues is higher than anybody else, right?”
Monzo Rejected Crypto Trading Because It Conflicted With the Bank's Mission
“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.”
Only a Handful of Global Companies Will Scale Digital Banking Long-Term
“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…”
TS Anil: Monzo Will Never Hold Mortgages on Its Own Balance Sheet
“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 …”
Refusing to Charge for Value Is Doing Charity With VC Money
“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…”
Hudack argued strongly against Monzo shipping crypto products
“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.”
Blomfield: Monzo scaling to 1,000 employees created culture clash over work-life balance
“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 …”
Blomfield: I ended up hating Monzo because it became bloated and over-regulated
“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,”
Blomfield: Monzo received 96 consecutive investor rejections for a 2020 flat round
“And I had 96 no's in a row for that fundraise to try and do a flat round.”
Blomfield: European neobanks N26, Revolut, and Monzo failed initial US expansion
“N-twenty-six has failed, Revolut's failed, Monzo's, the first go's failed”
Blomfield: Passionate customer love is the single prerequisite for scaling
“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…”
Chang: Revolut outexecuted Monzo and N26 purely on speed and ambition
“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.”
Tom Hulme: Non-dom investments in GoCardless yielded massive UK tech spinout value
“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…”
Monzo Selects Ireland as Its European Expansion Beachhead
“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.”
TS Anil: Early Regulatory Compliance Creates a Competitive Moat for Fintechs
“We know that getting it right actually creates a moat around our business in a very, very important way.”
TS Anil: Incumbent Banks Will Never Successfully Reinvent Themselves
“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 …”
TS Anil: A Mission Without a Business Plan Is a Bumper Sticker
“A mission without a business plan is a bumper sticker.”
Monzo Is Expanding to the US Using a Partner Bank Model
“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, …”
Monzo's Next Funding Round Will Target Institutional Investors Over VCs
“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.”
Revolut is a superior product to Monzo
“I think Monzo is just a, it's a more modern bank, like Revolut is a financial ecosystem.”
Revolut grew fastest in Ireland, Romania, and Poland, not the UK
“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.”
Blomfield: Monzo survived COVID by raising $100M in a 40% down round
“It was a sort of 40% down round. I think about 1.3 billion And we got a hundred million, and the company survived.”
Blomfield: Great founders simultaneously hold 10-year vision and daily execution
“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…”
Blomfield: Monzo spent only 2% to 3% of its capital on US expansion
“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.”
Monzo acquired 99% of its 1.2 million users through viral mechanics
“And here we are, 1.2 million customers, 99% through viral mechanics.”
Blomfield: Monzo will launch a third-party marketplace financial control center
“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.”
Monzo's early user base was 95% male and 95% London-based
“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.”
Monzo's early product was so buggy that 10% of card payments failed
“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…”
Fast-Scaling Regulated Companies Must Prevent Compliance Controls Debt
“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.”
TS Anil: Monzo Has Surpassed 10 Million Customers
“We have north of ten million customers now, Harry, right?”
Monzo Achieves £145 Retail ARPU and £150 Small Business ARPU
“It's about a 145 pounds. On the retail side. And 505 150 on the small business side.”
Monzo Adds Over 200,000 Monthly Users Primarily Through Word of Mouth
“We add over 200,000 new users a month. The vast majority of those are word of mouth.”
Monzo's Investment Waitlist Hit 150,000 After a Single Press Interview
“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.”
Full-Wallet Digital Banking Products Create Cycle-Resistant Revenue Streams
“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…”
Monzo Aims to Unite All Consumer Finance Products in One App
“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.”
Monzo Reviewers Use the Word 'Love' Seven Times More Than Competitors
“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?”
Monzo Was Running Out of Capital When TS Anil Became CEO
“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.”
Monzo Will Eventually Offer All Major Asset Classes With Educational Tools
“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,”
Regulated Fintechs Face a Smaller Operational Transition When Going Public
“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 …”
TS Anil: Monzo Will Eventually IPO but Is in No Rush
“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…”
TS Anil: Monzo Is Now the Largest Digital Bank in the UK
“Here we are, right, the largest UK digital bank and, you know, so much more.”
Neobanks Can Match Main-Bank ARPU Through High-Value Secondary Products
“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.”
Hudack would have expanded Monzo globally if regulation hadn't restricted it
“I would have grown Monzo globally.”
Blomfield: Offhand Founder Remarks at Monzo Sent 30-Person Teams Off Course
“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.”