Monzo

“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.”

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

“Oh, sub four billion.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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 …”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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,”

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

“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.”

“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 …”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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…”

“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…”

“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, …”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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…”

“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 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.”

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

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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 …”

“Our number one revenue stream was actually people using their debit cards overseas, and the interchange you get from that, and that went away overnight, and we were totally screwed.”

“If you build a thing, which is like, Beautiful and people love and has a place in their lives. You can charge more for it later. And you know, that goes against conventional wisdom. And I think if you have that knowledge it's a secret weapon because it's easie…”

“And I think ultimately, the best companies bring meaning to the name often, rather than the other way around. Monzo doesn't mean anything.”

“I would have grown Monzo globally.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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”

“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…”

“It was profitable.”

“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.”

“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 …”

“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 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…”