With the New Year in full swing, I wanted to take some time to reflect on what we achieved in 2019, and give a sneak peek of what’s in store for 2020.
2019 was a big year for Monzo 🚀
We started last January with just over a million customers, and now, over 3.6 million people bank with us. We’ve grown internally too, expanding from 500 to 1,500 Monzonauts in London, Cardiff, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and across the world.
We celebrated some firsts - launching our TV ad campaign; being named the UK's most recommended brand by YouGov; and Natalie, from our Vulnerable Customers team, won the Which? Consumer Champion award for our gambling block (a feature which lets people block gambling transactions to control their spending).
We launched a bunch of other products and features too, that take us one step closer to our mission: to make money work for everyone. Getting paid into Monzo gives you better visibility and more control over all your money, with the help of get paid early, Salary Sorter and Bills Pots. We also partnered with OVO Energy and Octopus to let you switch energy providers in the app, and save money on your bills.
If you want to save for something special, our savings marketplace offers an ever-growing number of providers and competitive interest rates to suit your savings goals. And if you need to borrow money, our loans and overdrafts offer a helping hand in a clear, fair and transparent way.
Last but not least, we launched our first version of business accounts to a small number of business owners. And with their feedback, we’ve been busy building an account that solves real business problems.
Although we’ve grown fast, we’ve stuck to our community roots - learning from your feedback, refining our approach, and trying to create a bank you’d be proud to call your own. Our Monzo Investival and Future of Monzo events last year brought more of our community together than ever before. And we continued working towards financial inclusion with our no barriers to banking campaign, aiming to help over a million adults in Britain who don’t have access to a bank account.
We’re proud of our progress, but there’s lots more to do 👀
Our vision now is the same as it was on day one; to build a hub for all of your money. We want to let you see and control everything about your financial life, whether that’s directly or through a partner. If you have a question about your money, Monzo should be the first place you go. How can I improve my credit score? How can I budget better? Where can I get reliable travel insurance? In the coming weeks and months, we’ll start to answer those questions.
We’ll do more to demystify credit scores and how they’re calculated in the app. We’ll help people track their borrowing health over time and work towards goals, like buying a house or paying for a course.
We’ll launch new paid accounts that give you even more from Monzo. Things like better tools to help you master your money and insurance that gives you real peace of mind while you're away. Your feedback helped us understand where we didn’t get this quite right last year, and we’re excited for you to see what we’ve created.
Plus, we’ll expand business banking: inviting lots more business owners to sign up, launching a web version of our business account, and building more features that help you achieve your goals, like international payments. And finally, we’ll continue our growth in the US following the hire of our new US CEO, TS Anil.
A huge thanks to each and every one of you 💫
We can’t thank you enough for all your support so far; Monzo only works because you make it work. We’re ready for 2020 and I’m excited to see what we achieve.