A year ago, we launched Extra, Perks and Max, our new subscription plans. Along with sausage rolls and railcards, this was also the debut of credit insights, a new way to stay on top of your credit score.
We knew that our customers cared deeply about their credit scores, but that other apps weren’t meeting their needs. So we built a brand new product from the ground up to replace Credit Tracker in Monzo Plus and Premium, powered by deep customer research and including a bunch of industry-first features. It looks like it’s resonating with people: it took just 10 months for us to reach 1 million users.
In this blog post, we’ll talk about the research and design process that got us here. We’ll share a few of the challenges we tackled along the way, including some prototypes that never saw the light of day. And we’ll compare what we’ve shipped so far against the product vision we initially set out.
Digging deeper into why people care about their credit score
We’ve known for a long time that Monzo customers care about building their credit score. That’s why we launched Credit Tracker in Monzo Plus back in 2020. But when we revisited the topic in summer 2023, it was clear that Monzo wasn’t doing enough to help. That’s when we set out to build credit insights.
First, we spoke directly to Monzo customers who cared about their credit score. User interviews allowed us to go into detail to understand people’s wants and needs, as well as how they’re addressing them today and their frustrations with the way these alternatives work.
We learned a lot from this research. In particular, we built a clearer picture of why people care about their credit scores. Interestingly, access to credit was only one of the four main reasons we heard. And we were also able to group customers into three distinct segments:
Repair: people who’ve had difficulties with credit in the past and are looking to get back on track
Build: people who are new to credit or new to the UK, and trying to get started building a credit history
Maintain: people who are pretty happy with their credit score, and simply want to stay on top of changes (including keeping an eye out for fraud)
This was important because these people had very different goals and therefore valued different features in a credit score app. Understanding this better allowed us to serve a few use cases well, rather than serving lots of use cases poorly.
Next, we ran a survey to quantify these needs. This helped us to contextualise the size of the segments and the depth of importance of different potential features.
One of the things that surprised us from this was that 70% of customers who regularly checked their credit score were using more than one tool. We’d previously assumed that people didn’t know or understand that there were three major credit reference agencies in the UK, each with their own proprietary credit score. If that were true, then putting more than one credit score in our app would probably cause more problems than it would solve.
Now that we knew lots of people were not only aware of their different scores but checking different ones regularly, it was clear we could make life a lot easier if we brought them all into one place. Plus, we’d have the chance to educate people that there’s no single credit score in the UK, and that they each offer a slightly different view of all the different things on your credit file. What really matters is how healthy your credit file is - much more than a single, arbitrary number.
Crafting a product vision
Our next step was to use all of this research to build a vision for what a better version of Credit Tracker might look like. There were a few components to this vision:
User segments - we’ve already mentioned these above
User needs tree - a comprehensive mapping of all the different credit score needs we’d heard versus the segments they were relevant to
Product principles - a set of guidelines to ensure we keep our research front of mind when making product decisions
A product vision acts as a focal point for the team to aim towards. It’s not necessarily intended to be built in its entirety, but it brings to life what could be possible and gets the team’s creativity flowing. At its best, it can even become a living reference document for the team to return to again and again.
The principles helped us to ensure that our research was not forgotten but instead considered in every design decision we made. We came up with five, and these are two of our favourites:
We strive to be specific, not general.
We have to be careful not to give out regulated financial advice. That’s not something Monzo is authorised to do, and it could lead to bad outcomes for customers if done by accident. But too many credit scoring apps go to the other extreme, sharing information that is so vague as to be practically useless. This principle reminds us to constantly challenge ourselves to provide useful, contextual education. This is why, for example, we show the simulated impact of taking a credit-boosting action on your credit score. It’s personal to your credit file and it’s concrete.
We focus on the full picture, not just a score.
This is about helping people to understand that any one credit score is just a singular view of their credit file. It’s like using your BMI to measure your health - it can be a useful starting point, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. This principle led to us creating a high-level credit health indication. We also think showing multiple credit scores helps people to understand that there’s no single correct view, as we’ll explore next.
Bringing three scores together - and making sense of them
In the UK, we have three main credit reference agencies, Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. So, all we had to do was put the three of these together in the Monzo app. Simple, right? While that might have been the minimum to meet a need for the 70% of our target customers who were checking multiple apps, we knew there was more work to do to make this feel intuitive.
As mentioned, one of our product principles was to focus on the full picture of credit health. As well as making all the different scores visible and trackable, we needed to provide customers with a way to easily digest their credit information without having to understand the different scoring models of the credit bureaus.
That led us to “credit health”, the most prominent element of the user interface. Credit health considers various aspects of a customer’s credit file to show where they are in their credit journey, linking back to the three segments of customers we discovered earlier: builders, repairers and maintainers. A score is just a number, but with credit health and the way we were going to highlight it, we were showing customers in words where they were and what they could do to progress.
Our early iterations, shown above, showed a customer’s credit health using Monzo’s illustration style. This reflected our brand well, but early testing suggested that this visualisation didn’t look like it was actually representing the user’s data. We took this feedback and refined our visualisation: still showcasing the Monzo brand, but now in an arched dial that visibly reflects the user’s data. Here’s what we launched back in April 2024, as part of our new Extra, Perks and Max subscriptions:
Iterating on our MVP
We gather feedback continuously from the Monzo app and from regular usability testing. After launch, a few themes became apparent:
It was hard to compare the different scores
Customers were used to knowing whether they were in a “Fair” or “Good” score band, and cared about how close they were to hitting the next band
Around this time, we managed to partner with Experian to add their score alongside TransUnion and Equifax. But this was only going to exacerbate the two problems above. Each agency uses a different scale. An Equifax score in the middle (500/1000) is considered “Fair”, but the same score for Experian (500/999) is “Very Poor”. TransUnion’s max score is 710, so 500/710 looks visually pretty good, but is in fact also considered “Very Poor”.
Here’s what that looks like in practice. Both of these scores are considered “Very Poor” by TransUnion and Equifax, but the TransUnion one looks much better. We needed to find a way to communicate that more clearly and quickly to users.
It quickly became clear that there was no perfect design that would give us all three things we were looking for: comparability across scores, accuracy to agency definitions of score bands and a visually clear indication. Given our product had three credit scores, users needed to be able compare the scores easily and at a glance. So we worked through a lot of iterations (36 to be precise) to find the best customer outcome.
Here’s where we landed in the end:
We decided to keep the portion of the dial corresponding to each colour consistent across each dial, which would allow people to easily read across the three dials. This meant a compromise: a score of 500/1000 with Equifax, for example, doesn’t mean that the dial is exactly half full.
We also iterated on the credit health indicator further. We were affording a lot of screen real estate to it, which we thought could have been improved given a user’s credit health doesn’t change very often. The updated, stripped back, horizontal bar also avoids the design having too many different arc dials in one screen, which was making it harder for the user to decipher the hierarchy of the screen.
What else we’ve learned along the way
Launching a new product is just a single milestone on the journey of learning about your users and the problems they’re trying to solve. Here are a few other things we’ve learned from customers since April.
Myths abound, but we can help with sensitive design
Whenever someone chooses to stop tracking their score, we ask them why. The responses we get provide some of the most valuable feedback of all. For example, we heard that people were concerned that tracking their credit score would cause it to reduce.
“I worry it will affect my score, constantly pinging it”
“Too many soft searches makes me uncomfortable even though they allegedly don’t affect the score”
“I’m seeing too many search alerts when I log into equifax and unsure if it’s a potential problem so cancelling just in case.”
Although this isn’t the case - requesting your score or credit file is a type of soft search that lenders can’t see - we had to do more to explain this in a simplified way. We made two changes:
We moved the weekly searches that power credit insights into their own category in the page showing different credit searches, with contextual information about them
We added an information box to highlight this information when users were disconnecting their score.
We acted quickly to make these changes, and they went a long way to reducing anxiety among users about doing harm to their credit file.
Getting alerted in real-time gives valuable peace of mind
We knew that being notified about changes was a standard feature that customers would expect from credit insights, which is why we prioritised adding this very soon after launch. We didn’t know that “staying on top of their credit file” would be the number 1 goal users would select (above improving their eligibility or getting ready for a mortgage), or that our engagement metrics would increase 40% when we added notifications.
We still had a principle that we wouldn’t build a product to drive engagement for the sake of it - it had to provide value. So it was important to strike a balance of giving people useful information in real-time, without drowning that out with a barrage of unimportant notifications. That’s why we tell you in the notification when a score change is small enough to not be worth worrying about, and why we don’t send you soft search notifications by default.
We need to give people easy ways to fix things that are wrong
We learned very quickly from app feedback that seeing the wrong things on your credit file was extremely frustrating. That frustration was only compounded when we didn’t give customers clear actions to take to do something about it. It doesn’t matter to users that accounts might be missing due to a partial match at the credit bureau, or that another provider was responsible for reporting the wrong information. They just wanted to fix it.
So we prioritised a better integration with TransUnion for disputing wrong information. We wanted people to be able to raise these disputes contextually in the Monzo app, rather than going to another web portal and filling out all their details again.
Since we launched this integration, we’ve seen this feedback reduce significantly as we give customers the tools to do something about it. We’re not done yet though. We want to reduce the frequency of users seeing one score that looks very different to the others, and we think we can do that by capturing and using previous addresses. Watch this space 👀
Results so far - and what’s next
After the initial launch in April 2024, we launched a free version of credit insights in November. This took a lot of the lessons we’d learned about helping our customers and distilled them into a simplified product focused on just the TransUnion score and report, refreshing monthly.
Across the paid and free version, more than 1.25 million Monzo customers are now using credit insights to stay on top of their credit file. While we spend most of our time thinking about the things we can improve, it’s also sometimes nice to read the positive feedback people give:
“This is great - saves me having to have a credit checking app, and will allow me to keep an eye on my score. Great stuff”
“I really like this feature! It’s more convenient than logging onto another app”
“Honestly one of the best integrations I’ve seen. Bravo.”
“I think it’s great to have it there and so simple to understand. I’m new to creating credit so the little tips it gave to help increase my credit score was so helpful. I followed the steps and check it everyday, waiting for it to climb to a better score 🙂”
“💪😎🤟”
When we look back on the product vision we set out, we’ve made good progress against many of the needs we identified. In fact, with today’s product, our users can fulfil 7 out of the 9 of these needs. There’s plenty more to do, but it gives us encouragement that we’re on the right track.
One of the things we’re planning to do next to keep iterating towards that vision is to add a clear way to see how your scores have changed over time (and, crucially, why that happened).
Conclusion
Listening to customers is a secret weapon for any company to build better products. Monzo is no exception. After 18 months of researching, building and iterating on credit insights, we can draw a straight line from what we’ve learned from customers to the design and features of the product we’ve built.
What we learned | How we built credit insights |
Customers were having to check multiple credit scoring apps | Credit insights lets you see 3 scores in one place with a design that makes them easily comparable |
Customers were unsure what to do next, and whether what they’d done had made a difference | Credit insights includes credit-boosting actions that estimate the score increase you’ll see and update when they’re completed |
Customers wanted to stay on top of their credit file above all else | Credit insights sends contextual notifications when there has been a change, and provides an easy way for customers to dispute things that don’t look right |
So what are you waiting for? Go check out credit insights in your Monzo app today!
PS: If what you’ve read here resonates and you’re passionate about making money work for everyone, we’re hiring designers, engineers, product managers and many more across Monzo! Take a look at our careers page to see if we have the right role for you.